The Believer (2001)

Henry Bean's The Believer arrives with a premise that sounds engineered for scandal and instead plays as something colder and stranger. Ryan Gosling, all jaw and fury, is Daniel Balint, a yeshiva prodigy turned neo-Nazi, a young man who can parse the Binding of Isaac and then go plant a bomb under a synagogue pulpit. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and has aged into a curious artifact: a serious study of hatred that declines every invitation to tell us what to think about it. The cast is almost entirely white, and the handful of Black characters exist only to be beaten by Daniel's crew. No casting agenda is visible here, because none was attempted.

Race sits at the center of the film, but not in any fashion a contemporary audience would recognize as instructive. Antisemitism is the subject, examined from inside a bigot's skull, and the movie is far more interested in Daniel's tortured logic than in the suffering he causes. A banker named Manzetti becomes his target, though the motive is conspiracy, not class rage; there is no redistributionist sermon hiding in the gunshots. Carla, played by Summer Phoenix, gets more interiority than the genre usually allows, but she orbits Daniel entirely, pleading and absorbing his violence. The film offers no critique of that arrangement, and does not seem to want one.

What remains is a movie of arguments. Scripture, Holocaust testimony, the mechanics of fascist fundraising: Bean stages them all as debate, and the debate never resolves into a lesson. The survivors who confront Daniel ask him what we should learn from him, and the film, to its credit, refuses to answer. There is no environmental subtext, no body-positive reframing, no neurological diagnosis for Daniel's torment, no revisionist reading of the historical record. He is simply a brilliant man consumed by self-loathing, and the movie lets him burn. Twenty-five years on, that restraint reads as almost antique.