First Reformed review: Veteran filmmaker Paul Schrader's best film in a long while

It is not so long ago that Paul Schrader seemed to be giving up on cinema. The American writer-director (whose credits include Taxi Driver, American Gigolo and Affliction) had taken to making movies like the sour Hollywood satire The Canyons with Lindsay Lohan and the cartoonishly violent Dog Eat Dog, shot cheaply, aimed at a VOD audience. The former had a montage of closed-down movie theatres. In interviews, Schrader struck a gloomy note about the future of the industry. This is why First Reformed is so refreshing. This is not just Schrader’s best film in a very long while. It is also a re-affirmation of the director’s belief in the medium.

The film is full of echoes of other filmmakers whose work Schrader admires. A story of a priest facing a crisis of faith, one of its most obvious influences is Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light. Its magical realist scene of levitation could come from a Tarkovsky movie. Schrader’s admiration for the French director Robert Bresson is well chronicled. Thankfully, these references don’t weigh down First Reformed, which has an austere intensity all of its own.

Ethan Hawke stars as Ernst Toller, a priest whose church, the “First Reformed”, is about to celebrate its 250th anniversary. The congregation is dwindling. The church itself is a draughty old building. There is a leak in the men’s restroom. It is shabby and very old-fashioned when compared to its bigger, newer, shinier and better funded near neighbour, “Abundant Life”.

The Reverend Toller is keeping a journal. He writes in longhand and promises to show “no mercy” in what he reveals about himself. Schrader immediately establishes a sharp contrast between the reserved and dutiful Toller we see going about his business in the church and the tormented figure, drinking whisky at his desk as he commits his thoughts to paper in what may turn out to be a suicide note. Toller has plenty to feel guilty about. His son, who enlisted on his advice, died in the Iraq war. His marriage crumbled in the wake of the son’s death. Toller’s health is failing.

At first, Toller’s faith appears solid enough. When a pregnant young wife, Mary (Amanda Seyfried), asks him to speak to her husband, environmental activist Michael (Philip Ettinger), he is exhilarated to do so. Michael is extremely wary about bringing a child into a world in which climate change threatens disaster. He wants Mary to terminate the pregnancy. Toller makes familiar arguments about following the “righteous” path. Michael seems to listen but his eventual response shocks Toller profoundly. This is a film about a man’s spiritual crisis but it has a strong eco-undertow. One of the most visually striking scenes is when the Reverend preaches a sermon at a toxic waste site with rusting ships and rubbish in the background.

Hawke gives a complex and moving performance as the priest, dedicated to others but being eaten away by his self-loathing.

Schrader may be a veteran filmmaker but he retains some of the same subversiveness and adolescent desire to shock that was there at the start of his career when he was a young screenwriter working on Taxi Driver. The Reverend Toller is like a more mature and religious version of Travis Bickle, the vigilante Robert De Niro played in that movie. Like Travis, Toller wants to clean up the filth. In his case, it’s not pimps and lowlife New York hustlers he is targeting but cynical big businesses like “Balq Industries” which give huge amounts of money to the church even as they leave pollution and devastation in their wake.

First Reformed is unsettling and deeply ambiguous. As he watches videos of suicide bombers or wraps himself in barbed wire, Toller appears unhinged – a self-pitying and masochistic psychopath. He can be wantonly cruel. We see him hissing at a choir leader, who cares for him and with whom it is implied that he had a brief affair, that he “despises” her. However, he is also the film’s conscience and its most lucid figure. His relationship with the pregnant woman (Seyfried) is hard to decipher. It goes well beyond that of a priest with a troubled member of his congregation. We are unsure whether it is shared faith, despair or even lust that bring them together.

“For you, every hour is the darkest hour,” Toller is warned by a senior church colleague who advises him to “do something in the real world”. By retreating into the spiritual realm and agonising over human weakness, the priest is driving himself towards despair.

Schrader, whose 1972 book Transcendental Style in Film focused on the work of Ozu, Bresson and Dreyer, has deliberately made an old-fashioned art house film, shot in box-like academy ratio and dealing with self-consciously heavy subject matter. The surprise is that it makes such gripping viewing. The director and his star demonstrate together that you don’t need superheroes, VFX or shootouts for a film to grab an audience’s attention. Against the odds, this story about a middle-aged reverend struggling desperately to make sense of his life is just as dramatic and surprising as even the most intricately plotted thriller.