Plenty of artists have posed existential questions in search of life’s meanings, but few artists have done so with as much as grace and thought as Terrence Malick. Malick, never one to rush his films, spent three decades working on the ideas that would ultimately take shape in The Tree of Life.

Jumping back and forth between the 1940s, 1960s, and 2010s, The Tree of Life follows a single family impacted by grief — a grief that leads to intense, Job-like questioning of God’s nature and decisions. But Malick’s exploration of such weighty questions is far from direct, and so the film includes a lengthy creation sequence replete with the Big Bang and dinosaurs as well as surreal sequences depicting the Solar System’s death and the afterlife.

Filled with luminous images inspired by Malick’s own Texas childhood, and an equally luminous performance by Jessica Chastain as the mother figure, The Tree of Life is as spiritual — in the best and truest sense of the word — as cinema gets.