“He says ‘frog,’ I jump.”

After Kit murders Holly’s father, he sets the man’s house ablaze. Then, Kit and Holly drive off into the night, and director Terrence Malick cuts to a hellish montage of items on fire — vintage photographs, peacock feathers, fruit, a kitchen table, the family piano, and more. Images of Holly’s bed, dolls, and other toys melting in flames symbolize her innocence being destroyed by Kit’s recklessness. A choir of stark female voices chants solemnly in German on the soundtrack during this montage; the score heightens our visceral response to the heavy drama of this scene.

This destructive night should be a life-altering moment for these two young characters — and it would be presented as such, in a typical film. But the first time that we see them together after this dramatic ordeal, their conversation comes across as emotionless and indifferent: “How you doin’?” “I’m fine. Kinda tired.” “Yeah, me too.” Then, as Kit’s car drives casually away from town, in bright daylight, a wholly different kind of music plays on the soundtrack: the bright, uplifting tones of a cheerful melody ringing out from a xylophone.

The striking shift in music between these scenes exemplifies a tonal contradiction that Terrence Malick repeats throughout Badlands. Kit kills Holly’s father, but the most intense reaction that Holly has to this is to lightly slap him in the face once, as if he said something out of turn. Kit later shoots his own friend, Cato, in the stomach, then neither tends to him nor disregards him in the moment; he merely makes absentminded small talk — “you never told me about her,” regarding a photograph of a woman on Cato’s shelf — while his friend bleeds out.

Kit and Holly never talk about the death of Holly’s dad until Kit casually brings the topic up near the end of the film: “It’s too bad about your dad.” “Yeah,” she replies, monotone. “We’re going to have to sit down and talk about that sometime.” She doesn’t reply, and they never sit down and talk about it.

In general, Kit never shows remorse for — or even full acknowledgement of — the horrible things that he does. Perhaps even more shockingly, Holly doesn’t either.

Rather, immediately after they run away from town, they build an elaborate treehouse together in the woods. “We planned a huge network of tunnels under the forest floor, and our first order of business every morning was to decide on a new password for the day,” Holly says, without a hint of irony or negative emotion, in her voiceover narration during this scene. “One day, I carried thirty pounds of wood a distance of five miles. Another day, while hiding in the forest, I covered my eyes with makeup, to see how they’d come out,” — not long after he father and others have been murdered in cold blood.

Malick then cuts from a close-up of her shoddily made-up eyes to a shot of her and Kit’s feet dancing in front of a radio, while a quirky pop song plays from a radio on the ground — “Love, love is strange…” They dance together happily, in bright daylight, in front of the treehouse that they made.

Malick bookends Kit and Holly’s road trip across the American midwest with this dance and another; near the end of the film, they dance together intimately at night, underneath a starless black sky, to a more melancholic tune: “The dream has ended, for true love died…“

These scenes frame everything that happens in between from Kit and Holly’s warped point of view. We are objectively horrified by the murderous and predatory actions of Kit, and in shock at Holly’s lack of concern or care for the people whom he kills. But Malick’s protagonists live in their own fairytale world, and he is not interested in telling us how terrible they are. Instead, he is much more interested in subjective storytelling that gives us a glimpse into what these characters’ perception of the world might be like. These dance scenes — along with the upbeat, xylophone-driven score and Holly’s pseudo-mature, oblivious narration — reveal to us that Holly and Kit are fully unaware of the consequences of their actions, and that they are, in their minds, living out a fantasy life as a romanticized Bonnie and Clyde. That we hear and experience the journey from their point of view results in a more compelling film that any that outright condemned them would ever be.

When Kit and Holly first meet, Malick dresses Kit in a white T-shirt and blue jeans and Holly in a blue T-shirt and white shorts. Together, they’re a perfect match — a yin and yang — in how they relate to one another… and bring out the worst in each other. Their wardrobe in this initial interaction seems to subtly indicate both their compatibility, and the complementary destructive forces that they represent.

Early in the film, Malick shows Kit curiously kicking a dead cow, then standing on top of it, for no apparent reason. Malick frames this action in a detached wide shot; there is no emotion to Kit’s action. At the end of Kit’s killing spree, too, he shows no emotion nor remorse; he merely says to Holly, “That guy with the deaf maid? He’s just lucky he’s not dead, too.”

“Kit was the most trigger happy person I’d ever met,” Holly says in narration after Kit shoots Cato. His complete lack of empathy for the people he kills — and lack of concern for what happens to him, too — is utterly nihilistic.

If Kit is nihilism, Holly is naïveté. Not only does she not recognize the severity of Kit’s actions, she seems incapable of self-awareness or critical thought. “I got some stuff to say,” Kit says when he first meets her. “Guess I’m kind of lucky that way. Most people don’t have anything on their minds, do they?” She agrees to go on a walk with him, to hear his thoughts out. He has absolutely nothing interesting to say to her. She’s so young and simple-minded that she doesn’t even realize it.

Malick reveals information about Holly’s past through her voiceover narration, but the perspective is always warped and subjective. We never learn much of anything about Kit. This lack of context — along with their complete lack of empathy — portrays them less as fully rounded characters and more as sheer forces of nature. The film is more mysterious, and therefore intriguing, as a consequence.

His nihilism is the yin to her naïveté’s yang. Separate, they are aimless; together, they are destructive.

After Kit shoots Cato, two of Cato’s friends show up at his farmhouse house. Kit immediately pulls a gun on them. “Let’s us step out in this field here,” Kit demands, buying time as he decides how he wants to handle the situation, and who else he wants to kill.

Malick then cuts to a beautiful, wide shot of the field. Kit and the young man negotiate the terms of their capture far away from the camera; we do not hear their conversation. They are small, swallowed up in the frame by nature. Holly and the man’s girlfriend casually stroll toward their significant others with zero urgency. We hear them converse: “What’s going to happen to Jack and me?” “You have to ask Kit. He says ‘frog,’ I jump.” “Okay.” “What’s your friend’s name?” “Jack.” “You love him?” “I don’t know.”

It’s a curious interaction, but everything about it — the violent and painful negotiation of the men made small and insignificant in the frame, the casual and banal conversation between their partners, a detached camera which, like the characters it displays, reveals no emotion — perfectly encapsulates what Malick’s storytelling approach in Badlands is all about.