FIRST REFORMED

Director: Paul Schrader

2018, 113, R

Screenwriter: Paul Schrader

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Amanda Seyfried, Philip Ettinger, Cedric Antonio Kyles, Michael Gaston, Victoria Hill.

 

For those of you who saw Winter Light or The Silence in our Ingmar Bergman Centennial Festival this summer will understand when we say that Paul Schrader’s First Reformed is an unholy mix of Bergman’s existential angst – and Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. In other words, Schrader’s new film is his best since (writing) Taxi Driver and (directing) American Gigolo! Ethan Hawke is somehow perfect in the role of a Dutch Reformed minister in upstate New York, whose son was killed in the Iraq War. As Hawke counsels a millennial couple (Philip Ettinger and Amanda Seyfried), he is not only unable to soften the young man’s radical environmentalism, but finds himself sucked into a world of paranoia and revenge.
“A mesmerizingly austere drama of one man’s apocalyptic crisis of faith – it feels like the movie Paul Schrader was put on this planet to make!” Ann Hornaday, Washington Post.