“Our loneliness gives us an all-consuming knowledge of the emptiness of all things, which can only be filled through the presence of our saviour”, intones Ethan Hawke in grave voice-over early in Paul Schrader’s First Reformed. It is rare that an artist so succinctly summarises their chief thematic preoccupations as Schrader does here: ever since the former critic broke out with his screenplay for Taxi Driver, his work as writer (Rolling Thunder, The Mosquito Coast, Bringing Out the Dead) and director (Hardcore, Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters, Affliction) has been primarily concerned with existentially tortured loners whose strong convictions set them on (often self-destructive) missions to reassert meaning and order in the world. With First Reformed, his 21st feature as director, Schrader delivers perhaps his most potent, sophisticated meditation on those signature themes yet, in a quiet yet resoundingly powerful philosophical drama that is at once deeply timely and universal.

The film opens as it means to go on, deliberately-paced and moody, as we slowly pan through an autumnal scene under a grey sky toward the towering colonial-era architecture of the First Reformed Church, a Dutch Reformed church in the Albany town of Snowbridge. Approaching its 250th anniversary, the church once played a role in the Underground Railroad but is now a glorified ‘souvenir shop’, overseen by Reverend Ernst Toller (Hawke), who spends his days showing tourists around and tending to his diminished congregation – most local parishioners preferring to worship at Abundant Life, a corporate bank-rolled mega-church just across the street from (and in ownership of) First Reformed, run by the charismatic Pastor Jeffers (Cedric Kyles). A former military chaplain tormented by guilt over the death of his son in Iraq and the subsequent collapse of his marriage, feelings of moral and spiritual impotence, and symptoms of stomach cancer exacerbated by his heavy drinking, Toller decides to keep a diary of his inner-most thoughts for a year, as a means of honest self-reflection (“When writing about oneself, one should show no mercy”) and as “a form of prayer”. After a service, pregnant parishioner Mary (Amanda Seyfried) asks Toller to offer counsel to her husband Michael (Phillip Ettinger), a radical environmental activist on compassionate release from jail to care for Mary during her pregnancy; he wants her to have an abortion, believing it to be unethical to bring a child into a world sliding toward “unliveability”, and she hopes Toller can talk him around. However, after a lengthy discussion of martyrdom and apocalypse with the younger man, Toller’s sense of despair and uncertainty only deepens, and in the wake of a series of distressing revelations and events the pastor begins to contemplate a drastic course of action.

First Reformed is, above all, a truly adult film, the work of an intelligent and thoughtful storyteller who credits his audience with the same level of intelligence and thoughtfulness. Schrader plunges us into the darkness of Toller’s “torpor” without apology, and refuses to offer easy answers to the moral quandaries raised. As Toller grows increasingly disillusioned with the co-option of Christianity by capitalism, a sense of moral urgency rises while Schrader gradually paints a grim picture: the church, the film daringly suggests, has failed in its intended duty as a bastion of justness and a haven for the weak by allowing itself to become subdued to corporate interests. First Reformed is not so much a film about whether Christianity is right or wrong as what being a good Christian (or a person of any faith – Toller’s ethical dilemmas will resonate with anyone who has ever believed strongly in any way of life or moral code) even means in the age of late capitalism and climate change.

In Toller’s voiceover and editor Benjamin Rodriguez Jr’s numerous cuts between images of decay and industrial destruction and Hawke’s forlorn face, the film poignantly captures the feeling of helplessness in a world that seems hell-bent on tearing itself apart, while also interrogating each and every one of us about our own complicity in corrupt systems and asking us to consider if we really do live up to the values we claim to believe in. “Will God forgive us? For what we’ve done to this world?” Michael asks Toller, and that questions hangs over the whole film right up to the bold, stirring, finale, which may or may not offer an answer and will provoke, frustrate, and fascinate for years to come.

This is high-minded philosophical filmmaking of a kind that is quite unfashionable these days (Schrader is letting us know exactly what we’re in for when he sites Dreyer’s The Diary of a Country Priest and Bergman’s Winter Light as key influences), yet it feels made for our times, a film that encapsulates perfectly the experience of living in what feels like the end times and wondering why no one else seems to care.

Drawing on his usual prestigious set of formal influences (Ozu, Dreyer, Bresson), Schrader brings his story to life in careful, deliberate fashion. Nothing about the style of First Reformed is showy, but at the same time everything about it is considered. Schrader and cinematographer Alexander Dynan shoot the film in the flat, compressed Academy ratio, creating a sense of confinement befitting the spiritual frustrations of Hawke’s protagonist, while their compositions are inauspicious yet full of telling detail in their production design and blocking. The film finds inventive ways of framing the nearly ever-present Hawke, his face – almost always riddled with palpable anguish – often centred in Dynan’s images (a prolonged reaction shot after a tourist tells a bawdy joke is a surprising moment of visual comedy that tells us everything we need to know about how Toller feels about the world’s treatment of religion), while giving him an almost Byronic aspect as he stands amid shipyards clad in his flowing black cassock, a shadowy avatar of Protestant fury. The colour palette is pallid and austere, emphasising ashen grey skies and oaken interiors, while Toller’s home, where he writes and drinks at night, is rendered in a menacing lamp-lit chiaroscuro, making the film’s sudden bursts of colour – neon signs glimpsed through Toller’s car window, pink Pepto Bismol settling in his whiskey (just two of several deliberate visual call-backs to Taxi Driver), a vivid purple sunrise – viscerally shocking, like moments of revelation. The First Reformed Church itself often appears shot from low angles that emphasise its height, a monolithic monument to the righteousness and integrity that Toller struggles to embody. Lustmord provides an ethereal ambient score, barely present for the most part but intensifying to emotive effect at exactly the right moments. The restraint on display makes it all the more stunning and exciting whenever Schrader decides to break out his weirder, grindhouse-informed side (think Cat People), most notably in a thrilling fantasy sequence that evokes Tarkovsky and Schrader’s AFI classmate Terrence Malick. This is the work of a director working with the benefit of years of experience, the casual confidence of someone who has taken their time to master their craft.

Also displaying utter perfection in their craft is Hawke, who’s reserved yet powerhouse turn here may well be a career best. There is a weariness to his movements, and an exhaustion in his perpetually furrowed brow, giving the sense of a man sick in both body and mind. He exudes a constant air of inward agony, manifesting sometimes as moral outrage, sometimes as self-loathing, and sometimes as pained, awkward silence, but always grounded in the same sense of utter desperation. “You’re always in the Garden”, Jeffers tells Toller; “Not even Jesus was always in the Garden.” – Hawke brings this stubborn, self-flagellating devotion to life in a manner both deeply sympathetic and profoundly frustrating to watch. This is astonishing work, a deeply nuanced depiction of someone staring into the abyss that will doubtless be looked back on as one of the highlights of Hawke’s varied filmography. Amanda Seyfried gives a shaded, highly interior performance as a conflicted young woman trying to sort through contradictory feelings that test her faith in more ways than one. Seyfried dramatizes inner turmoil and unspoken un-fulfilment powerfully through the movements of her expressive eyes, the rueful inflections she gives to apparently incidental lines, and the shifting of her expressions during the scripts many loaded silences, in an affecting performance that ought to remind critics and directors just how underrated and under-utilised an actress she is. Cedric Kyles, meanwhile, has in some ways the films hardest task, making a genuine human being out of a character who, to Toller, is the embodiment of everything wrong with contemporary organised religion. He refuses to play Jeffers as a simple symbol or villain, instead imbuing him with genuine charm and warm sincerity subtly offset by a pragmatism that occasionally, quietly edges on the mercenary. He plays Jeffers as a decent man and a true believer who nonetheless can’t quite see that following the letter of scripture isn’t the same as acting in its spirit, in a complex turn that highlights Kyles’ largely neglected dramatic capabilities.

Marking a welcome return to form after the misfiring likes of The Canyons and The Dying of the Light, First Reformed sees one of American cinemas most distinct, uncompromising voices at the top of his game. Perfecting his typical stylistic and intellectual motifs, Schrader has made a modern classic that may well define its cultural moment in the same way that Taxi Driver did its own, while Ethan Hawke delivers a searing tour-de-force opposite an array of excellent supporting performances. This excoriating morality play is concerned with studiousness and contemplation, and demands such from its audience.

Written by Milo Farragher-Hanks

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