First Reformed (2018)

Paul Schrader's First Reformed arrives as a study in austere spiritual collapse, and it is a very serious film about a very serious man. Ethan Hawke plays Reverend Ernst Toller, a minister in upstate New York who keeps a journal, drinks whiskey, and watches his small congregation dwindle into a tourist attraction. The film is shot in a boxy aspect ratio and paced like a held breath. There is nothing casual here. Every frame announces its own gravity.

The engine of the thing is environmental despair. A young activist named Michael cannot bear to bring a child into a warming world, and his conviction drives the plot toward a suicide vest and a scattering of ashes at a toxic waste dump. The film sets that anguish against Edward Balq, an industrialist who calls climate change complicated, and against a megachurch that takes his money. Corporate greed and ecological ruin are treated as the same sin wearing different suits. The argument is made plainly, sometimes from a pulpit, sometimes across a diner table, and the film does not pretend to neutrality.

Elsewhere the ledger is thinner. Mary, the pregnant widow, is handled with genuine tenderness, though she exists to illuminate a man's crisis. The cast is largely white save for Cedric Kyles in a supporting turn, and the church's history as a stop on the Underground Railroad is mentioned once and then set aside. Race, sexuality, body image, and neurological difference are not concerns here. What remains is a somber, well-made sermon on stewardship, delivered by a man who has stopped believing anyone is listening.