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A teenage girl sits on her bed along with a dog. She shakes his paws and he “smiles” the way dogs do, tongue out, cheerful and heartwarming. Then the girl’s voice chimes in, telling us her mother died of pneumonia when she was little, and her once-romantic father kept their wedding cake in the freezer for a decade before he could bear to throw it out. “He could never be consoled by the little stranger he found in his house.” The girl’s name is Holly (Sissy Spacek). She speaks with poetic eloquence, captivating and informative, evoking an entire childhood and personality with a few simple sentences. And she’s about to go on a killing spree.

Next, the camera finds a garbage man hovering over a dead dog. He pokes at it strangely, curiously, then turns to his fellow trash collector and says “I’ll give you a dollar to eat this collie.” His co-worker approaches and stares at the carcass. “I’m not going to eat it for a dollar,” he says, “and I don’t think he’s a collie either.” The man shrugs. His name is Kit (Martin Sheen), and he’s about to go on a killing spree.

Back home, Holly twirls a baton in the street. “Little did I realize that what began in the alleys and back ways of this quiet town would end in the Badlands of Montana,” her voiceover says. Back on Kit, he throws a piece of fruit to a dog.

The two meet as the film’s title screen appears: Badlands (1973). “Do you want to take a walk with me?” Kit asks Holly. “What for?” she answers. Good question.

The film introduces both characters through associations with dogs. Holly is loving and playing with hers, the accompanying voiceover implying she has a stronger connection with it than her father. Kit, on the other hand, is morbidly interested in a alley-dwelling corpse. He’s not put off by its discovery and instead jokes about eating it; the standard response of no human with a sound mind. But deeper than that, both scenes reveal a form of emptiness within the characters involved—and so they meet.

Holly’s purpose in Badlands is to be the sidekick of Kit. She speaks of love for him that may or may not exist, romanticizes their time together, and finds purpose in being his companion. “I’ve got to stick by Kit… He feels trapped,” she tells a character later on. “I’ve felt that way, haven’t you?”

Kit, by contrast, is in need of designing his own image. He feels suffering will make him philosophical, and fame—even if acquired through notoriety—makes your words worth something. He speaks into dictaphones during the film as if his words will have some great resonance in society once he’s a known killer. The dead dog interests him as an image of pain and death.

Holly’s dad (Warren Oates) shoots her dog when he finds out she’s been seeing Kit. He ruins Holly’s one emotional attachment in life. Attempting the path of courtesy, Kit approaches the man and asks for his blessing to date his daughter. Not receiving it kicks off the murder spree—later that night, Kit puts two rounds into Holly’s dad. The two find connection in their shared emptiness and burn down Holly’s house with her father’s body inside.

Through subtlety and Malick’s wonderful writing, these two characters are introduced through different experiences with dogs. Following the death of Holly’s pet, an act performed because of her relationship with Kit, the two stories become entwined and the film’s main chain of events is set into motion.