Paul Schrader’s First Reformed premieres in Competition in Venice before screening in the Masters program in Toronto, and the New Yorker’s Richard Brody finds it to be “a fierce film; Schrader, one of the crucial creators of the modern cinema (among his many achievements, he wrote Taxi Driver and directed American Gigolo), seems to have made it in a state of anger, passion, pain, mourning, and desire, held together by the conflicted religious fury—blending exaltation and torment—that runs through all of his films. Schrader is only seventy-one, and I trust that he has many years of artistic creation ahead of him. But First Reformed nonetheless has the feeling of a summation, of a teeming and roiling avowal of his longtime obsessions, from the distant pressure of family life as a child to the repellent politics currently unfolding daily.”
“In an interview in March, Paul Schrader questioned the ongoing usefulness of Slow Cinema,” notes Filmmaker’s Vadim Rizov, and “regardless of how I feel about Schrader’s pronouncement, there’s something very cool about First Reformed, which acts as a form of film criticism and quite credibly engages with the medium it seeks to course correct. . . . At first, Schrader appears to have assimilated the method wholly: we’re in a 1.37 square frame, there’s a very slow and portentous dolly in on a church, and the first few scenes flirt with the staples of this kind of filmmaking: meticulously symmetrical framing, a paucity of dialogue, etc. But two things immediately make this different: before we get to the church where Toller (Ethan Hawke) ministers, we spend some time with him. It’s immediately clear that Schrader is revisiting and revising (and not shy about taking as a template) Diary of a Country Priest, which I’d highly recommend rewatching as prep beforehand if it’s been a while: Toller writes a diary in longhand, and Schrader goes all in with his framing, the precise same overhead tilted-down shots and angles Bresson used.”
TheWrap’s Alonso Duralde takes it from here: “One of Toller’s few parishioners, Mary (Amanda Seyfried) asks him to counsel her husband Michael (Philip Ettinger, Compliance); Mary is pregnant, but Michael, a committed environmental activist, thinks it’s immoral to bring a child into this decaying world. Spending time with Michael convinces Toller that God objects to man’s destruction of the world, which puts him in an awkward position with Barq (Michael Gaston, The Leftovers), a wealthy local industrialist—and major contributor to both churches—who happens also to be a world-class polluter. But First Reformed is less about that plot than it is character, and Schrader and Hawke have collaborated on a searing portrait.”
“Schrader’s new drama blows into town like Jesus at the temple,” writes the Guardian’s Xan Brooks. “It’s here to call out the hypocrites, railing at the way in which Christianity is deployed as a convenient fig leaf by the resurgent American right, or perhaps as a bizarre form of carbon offsetting whereby a historic church makes amends for a toxic river. First Reformed is a deeply felt, deeply thought picture; impressive in its seriousness and often gripping in the way it frames itself as a debate and a sermon. It is also, crucially, a flawed portrait of a flawed man, at war with its baser instincts and in danger of backsliding. And when Schrader’s hero begins to overheat, his film can’t help but follow suit.”
“For a while,” writes Variety’s Owen Gleiberman, “the drama echoes Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light—a priest in a remote parish haunted by his inability to save souls. Schrader works in a stately, dark-toned style that’s far more compelling than the frenetic genre hash of his last two films, Dying of the Light (2014) and Dog Eat Dog (2016). (The luscious, chocolate-bar cinematography is by Alexander Dynan.) Yet First Reformed remains, at heart, a programmatic highbrow exploitation film. I mean that as a compliment.”
“It's his most effective work as a director since Auto Focus fifteen years ago, but it's a direly bleak affair,” finds the Hollywood Reporter’s Todd McCarthy. “The movie's concerns are obvious, not subtle, and while intellectual energy abounds, laying in subtext, building underlying tension physical and creating visual dynamism are not Schrader's strong suits.”
“Similar to Larry Fessenden’s brand of ecological horror films (The Last Winter, Wendigo), the more twisted elements of Schrader’s storytelling are grounded in a profound socially conscious intent,” writes IndieWire’s Eric Kohn. “That’s especially true in the gripping finale, a suspenseful moment in which Toller confronts his contradictory impulses with a bloody, unexpected act that brings the full scope of the movie’s ambition into focus.”
Meantime, Fresh Air has posted Terry Gross’s 1988 interview with Schrader (19’46”).
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