Director/writer Paul Schrader’s First Reformed is a devastating examination of themes that have characterized all of his work: doubt, guilt, and the intersection between organized religion and personal pain. Ethan Hawke, in a tortured and career-defining performance, stars as Reverend Ernst Toller, a brooding minister of a small rural congregation whose professional and personal life is upended by a burgeoning relationship with an unstable environmentalist and his pregnant wife. The film is crafted such that its disturbingly intimate portrait of a man in crisis is also overtly and searingly political.
The film represents one of Schrader’s finest achievements as a writer, with a screenplay that deserves to mentioned alongside his most provocative, morally challenging scripts (most notably, his Scorsese collaborations, including The Last Temptation of Christ, Raging Bull, and Taxi Driver). What truly surprises about First Reformed, however, and what makes it one of the year’s best films, is Schrader’s elegant work behind the camera: as a director, I didn’t realize Schrader had a film this nuanced in him. He employs quietly powerful compositions and mesmerizing tracking shots to depict Toller’s growing despair, finding powerful meaning in minor shots (in a particularly unsettling example, we watch in quiet horror as a dose of Pepto-Bismol dissolves in a glass of whiskey). A third act that boldly experiments with hallucinatory sequences and surreal imagery cements First Reformed as an unusual, uncompromising classic.
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