First Reformed Review

Schrader spent forty years writing about transcendental style and then finally shot one, in Academy ratio, with almost no camera movement and no score at all. Ethan Hawke's Toller keeps a journal he intends to burn, and the structure of the film is that journal: a year of entries, a body failing, a faith curdling into something with a body count. Hawke plays it with the volume turned down, and it is the best work of his career, all held breath and pressed lips.

Alexander Dynan lights the parsonage like a cell. The counselling scene with Philip Ettinger's despairing environmentalist runs fifteen minutes of two men talking and carries more dread than most thrillers manage in two hours, and Cedric Kyles is quietly superb as a megachurch pastor who is not a hypocrite, merely a manager. Then come the levitation, the barbed wire and an ending Schrader has refused to explain. We think the ecological despair is the occasion rather than the subject. This is a film about a man who cannot forgive himself, and it is merciless about it.