Deborah Ross

Losing his religion

Despite a shockingly bizarre ending (involving Drano and barbed wire), you won’t be able to look away

issue 14 July 2018

Paul Schrader’s First Reformed is slow, churchy, cerebral, bleak, difficult, tormented and puzzling, which is always a blow. So exhausting when a film’s meaning isn’t laid out clearly and neatly before you. But it is, at least, powerfully puzzling and grippingly puzzling. You may not understand it (completely), but you will come away with the feeling that something was being said, whatever that something may have been.

Ethan Hawke stars as the Revd Ernst Toller, leader of First Reformed Church somewhere in upstate New York. The church, which dates from 1767, is built in the Dutch style, and is white and clapboard, pretty as a picture. But right from our first sight of Toller we understand that he is a darker proposition, and is suffering in some way. (This is conveyed almost entirely by Hawke’s extraordinary internal performance.)

The church has almost no congregation — it’s on the tourist trail and is essentiallya souvenir shop these days — but one parishioner, Mary (Amanda Seyfried), does seek him out for advice.

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