Paul Schrader

Paul Schrader’s First Reformed is his fourth film in five years, following the reinvention-spawning masterpiece The Canyons (2013), the failed, compromised 2014 Nicolas Cage thriller Dying of the Light (recently repurposed, remixed, and reclaimed as a new film entitled Dark), and the gonzo, goofy Nicolas Cage thriller Dog Eat Dog (2016). These previous films are representative of Schrader progressing from the end of a financially supported, studioassisted working methodology into a cheaper, bolder, more liberated one, and First Reformed is the apex of this new phase in what’s now a nearly 50-year career. Schrader shows no signs of slowing down.

And how unlikely is that? Watching First Reformed, one sees a theoretical thinker continuing to push the tools of his chosen medium into unexplored places. Even more unlikely: First Reformed finds the 71-year-old Schrader maturing into a sense of confidence and patience with himself unseen for over two decades, perhaps since Affliction (1997). But, with this film, he is, as always, up to something new. Deliberately at odds with contemporary mainstream style, pacing, and narrative clarity, First Reformed is a young man’s film, made with a young man’s unbroken confidence and reckless sense of “now or never.” Starring Ethan Hawke as a Calvinist Reverend whose life becomes intertwined with that of Amanda Seyfried’s grieving widow, the film is a slow, deliberate rumination on faith, the fear of environmental collapse, self-doubt, and grief—all the things an actual young man making this film would fail to capture with any measure of authenticity.

Nothing would be easier for a filmmaker of Schrader’s age and status than to throw up his hands and proclaim that the system has moved away from him. Instead, he learns: he makes movies quicker, cheaper, and with more furious intensity than any of his peers. (Imagine De Palma making a movie as cheap and icky as . It would along with a newly written essay-length introduction called “Rethinking Transcendental Style,” the writing of which was, not coincidentally, done in tandem with the conception of . “Rethinking Transcendental Style” concludes with the visual summation of Schrader’s examination of the modern landscape of Slow Cinema: a graph of his own creation depicting a circle with an “N” in the centre, representing narrative. The further away you get from the “N,” the closer you come to passing through what Schrader terms the “Tarkovsky Ring,” or the point at which commercial-leaning slow cinema becomes less well suited for theatrical exhibition.