After four films devoted to the America of the past, The Tree of Life (2011) opens a new period in which Terrence Malick anchors himself in the contemporary world. This temporal shift coincides with the appearance, in his work, of a topos inherited from the Judeo-Christian tradition and the theosophists of the East: the “desert.” Introduced in The Tree of Life, it is taken up and further explored in Knight of Cups (2015), giving the story its symbolic form. This article sets out to study its meaning through a close aesthetic analysis, in relation to the filmmaker’s philosophical and theological sources of inspiration, deriving from both Western and Eastern traditions, and thus shedding light on his work.