This chapter analyses To the Wonder (2012) Knight of Cups (2015) and Song to Song (2017) as consistent meditations on the exhaustion of teleological notions of time in contemporary Western cultures. These films, released in rapid succession in the 2010s, present very similar stylistic and aesthetic features and are the only Malick films to date entirely shot in contemporary settings. While To the Wonder is partly shot in France, the other two are entirely filmed in the United States. All three films utilise experimental shooting and extraordinary editing techniques to tell their stories. They use unconventional editing and narrative structures to organise direct cinema style images of contemporary Oklahoma (To the Wonder), contemporary Los Angeles (Knight of Cups) and contemporary Austin (Song to Song). The resulting portrait is certainly not an homage to the beauty of the American dream and its ideals of freedom, progress, liberty and individual fulfillment, but a haunting rendition of an age in which human alienation, economic exploitation of natural resources, art and spirituality are seen coming full circle and reaching exhaustion.

Malick's twenty-first century's settings expose the dysfunctional relation between humans and nature in the deeply alienated worlds they portray. Contrary to dominant religious and esoteric readings of Malick's films of the 2010s, building on the insights of previous chapters and in an appreciation of the Benjaminian ecocinema framework developed, these films cannot be analysed as simple illustrations and endorsement of reactionary religious views, or as simple ‘critiques’ of the American capitalist ideology portrayed in their narrative and formal elements.