Featuring the strikingly fresh-faced pairing of Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek in star-making roles, Terrence Malick's 1973 directorial debut Badlands is like no one else's movies: shockingly beautiful, equal parts real and alien, and understatedly humorous when you least expect it. Sheen's disarmingly likable Kit Carruthers is a 25-year-old sociopath who takes Holly Sargis — a decade his junior and disquietingly unobjecting — on a murderous rampage through a cinematically pristine 1950s Midwest. Spacek's Holly narrates their killing spree, in a prairie-flat voice that's a mix of paperback romance and existential profundity.
"When people express what is most important to them, it often comes out in clichés," Malick said once of Spacek's narration, in one of his few interviews. "That doesn't make them laughable; it's something tender about them. As though in struggling to reach what's most personal about them they could only come up with what's most public." As such, it's Holly — not the homicidal Kit — who is the film's pivotal character. "Where would I be this very moment," she murmurs, "if Kit had never met me, or killed anyone ... this very moment."
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