A Terrence Malick film is always an event. He makes cinema for serious dreamers, and his handling of landscape is second to none. The New World, a reworking of the real Pocahontas story, is a hypnotic piece of art that can be truly appreciated only on a big screen.

Three English ships struggle up the James River in Virginia in 1607 and drop anchor in the heart of Native American country. The settlers build a log fort but can barely scratch a living. Colin Farrell’s soldier of fortune, Captain John Smith, is ambushed by the natives while scavaging for food.

He is spared by the timely intervention of the chief’s favourite daughter (Q’Orianka Kilcher). Months later Smith returns to the scrawny, starving colony, ostensibly to take them back home, but the squabbling settlers have no intention of leaving.

Rather than impose a conventional narrative, Malick carves his film out of the verdant landscape and sleepy creeks. The soundtrack is alive with insects, and winds rustling through fields of grass. Farrell’s voiceover is a melancholy whisper. “They lack greed, envy, guilt . . . they have no jealousy, no sense of possessions,” he rasps. The plot is an elongated mumble.

The romance between Kilcher’s febrile free spirit and Farrell’s shifty intruder sows the seeds of the bitter pastoral melodrama. There’s a giddy sense of technical freedom and spontaneity, but infuriating lapses of credibility. It’s almost too enamoured of the myth to do justice to the facts.

The bouts of violence between strapping natives and puny settlers are staged like lopsided football matches. Farrell has spent too many nights in a Brixton tattoo parlour to take off his shirt with impunity, and his Cavalier haircut makes him look like the missing link in the Bee Gees line-up. The 14-year-old Kilcher throws lots of uninhibited shapes while dancing through the forest, but her foxy leather slips might have fallen off a peg in Harrods. That said, her performance is a startling joy.

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