The Card Counter (2021)

Paul Schrader has spent a career arranging men in small rooms with their guilt, and The Card Counter continues the project with Oscar Isaac's William Tell, a former interrogator who plays modest poker hands and wraps motel furniture in bedsheets. The film's social consciousness registers as a low hum. Tiffany Haddish occupies the second lead as La Linda, a Black woman running a gambling stable, and the cast is agreeably multiethnic. None of it is curated. The film casts people and moves on, which in the current climate reads as almost negligent.

La Linda negotiates on her own terms and answers to no man in the room, though the screenplay never advances a thesis about gender and shows no interest in doing so. There is no queer presence of any kind. Abu Ghraib sits at the center of the story, but the lens is moral and psychological, a study of complicity and shame, not a racial critique. Mr. USA, the Ukrainian player in a jingoistic American costume, is mocked as obnoxious nationalism and nothing more. The casino circuit is rendered as dreary and transactional, its investors implied parasites, but this is atmosphere. Nobody hands out a pamphlet.

The film does revise the tidy official account of America's torture scandal, holding a decorated officer culpable for the rot he trained and escaped. Schrader remains a preacher, delivering mournful pronouncements about guilt and institutional evil in a register closer to Calvinist confession than to contemporary social instruction. Climate, body image, and neurodivergence go untouched. Tell's flat affect reads as buried trauma, not diagnosis. The result is a grim, well-made film that keeps its politics in the confessional booth, where they belong.