First Reformed, starring Ethan Hawke, is bruising, vital, and one of the year’s best films

I could never have watched Paul Schrader’s First Reformed dispassionately. Like Schrader, I was raised in a strict Christian community and didn’t watch movies until I was in my late teens, something that fundamentally shaped how I approach film today. I’ve also spent a lot of my adulthood thinking and writing about religion and transcendence in film, and decades ago, Schrader literally wrote the book on that topic.

And then he went and made a movie about a minister in a small church, working in the shadow of a much larger megachurch, who plummets into a dark night of the soul brought on partly by a growing feeling that what he’s believed and taught all his life isn’t a sufficient answer for the struggles of the world in which he lives. And if that wasn’t enough, Schrader set the film in upstate New York, in Albany County, where I was born and raised — a chilly and gray place much of the year, and an area pollsters consistently rank among the least Christian regions in America.

So yes, for me watching First Reformed — first last autumn at the Toronto Film Festival, and then again a few weeks ago — was one of those experiences that critics rarely have, of feeling like a movie was made specifically for me.

But that doesn’t mean it’s easy for me to put it into words.

Critics have rightly declared First Reformed to be one of the year’s best American films. Featuring a stunning performance from Ethan Hawke, it lingers uneasily in the subconscious. Furious and darkly funny, it’s a tight, explosive encapsulation of our very specific moment in history, and one that brings both the physical and metaphysical into the picture as it considers what could be the future. And it dares to wonder aloud whether we’ll be forgiven for ushering it in.

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First Reformed ably dramatizes a church struggling for its life in the shadow of a megachurch

Reverend Toller, played with chilling, muted, disintegrating fury by Hawke, is the minister of a small church maintained more for its historical significance — once a stop on the Underground Railroad, it’s about to celebrate its 250th anniversary — than its thriving ministry. In an accurate but obvious metaphor, it’s surrounded by a graveyard with crumbling, toppling headstones.

The bigger church nearby, Abundant Life, is where it’s all happening. Abundant Life isn’t a “megachurch” by the standards of some regions in the US — it boasts a “mere” 5,000 seats. But in upstate New York, that counts as quite large, and it’s in stark contrast with First Reformed, which has about 10 people in attendance on a good Sunday.

Abundant Life has roomy offices, a youth choir, cushioned maroon pews, many staff members, a corporate-sponsored media production center, and a cafeteria with a passage from the biblical book of Acts printed on the wall. And it’s led by Pastor Jeffers who, in an inspired bit of meta-casting and barbed commentary on the modern evangelical church, is played by Cedric the Entertainer.

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In a device that mimics Robert Bresson’s 1951 film Diary of a Country Priest, which Schrader’s film draws on structurally and thematically, Jeffers serves as a kind of mentor and guardian angel for Toller and for First Reformed. The smaller church’s budget comes mostly from Abundant Life, and when they need something, whether it’s organ repairs or plumbing, the larger church is there to help.

Toller is grateful for the help, of course, and for the job, especially since Jeffers offered it to him in the wake of his son’s death in Iraq and his divorce. But it’s clear that it also feels a tad insulting and more than a tad patronizing to Toller that Abundant Life knows First Reformed can’t support itself.

In America, where churches abound, the mark of successful ministry — and, implicitly, a minister’s effectiveness at the job — is a growing, financially comfortable congregation. And given that the evangelical brand of American Christianity to which Abundant Life seems to belong is deeply dependent on the appeal of its head pastor to attract congregants, First Reformed’s dwindling congregation reflects badly on Toller.

Not everyone prefers Abundant Life’s comfortable, cheery brand, though. A young woman named Mary (Amanda Seyfried) attends First Reformed with her husband, Michael (Philip Ettinger), an environmental activist who was discharged from prison on compassionate leave because Mary is several months pregnant. They attend First Reformed partly because Michael thinks Abundant Life is “more of a company than a church,” as Mary tells Toller.

Mary is the religious one in the couple, but she asks Toller if he’d meet with Michael, who wants her to have an abortion rather than bring a child into a world where he sees only impending environmental apocalypse. Toller obliges. At Mary and Michael’s house, the two men talk about compassion and life, about God’s love and the confusion of the world, and agree to meet again.

But Toller’s health is failing in all ways — bodily, emotionally, and spiritually. He begins keeping a diary as an “experiment,” in which, he tells us in voiceover, he will confide to God every morning. “When it is possible,” he clarifies. “When he is listening.”

And after his meeting with Michael, things don’t get better. They get worse. As First Reformed’s 250th-anniversary celebration approaches, Toller’s mood grows darker. He drinks more and starts to lose the ability to deal with anyone — especially Esther (Victoria Hill), a choir director at Abundant Life with whom he had a past relationship, whose persistent inquiries after his well-being disgust him. Toller is headed for a breakdown, or maybe an epiphany, and when it comes, it turns the whole measured, austere film on its ear.

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First Reformed is about fear in an era of extremisms

One afternoon at the Abundant Life youth group, a teen erupts into a startling and familiar-sounding rant against “political correctness,” seemingly out of nowhere. Toller later tells Jeffers about it, saying that “there’s just no middle ground with these kids — everything is so extreme.”

“These are frightening times,” Jeffers says, by way of explanation. “These kids, they want certainty. Don’t think. Follow.”

But it’s our very certainty, the film suggests, that may damn us in the end. First Reformed seems presciently poised for 2018’s frightening times, though there are no overt references to the era of Trump. American culture in 2018 fosters extremisms of all sorts, and First Reformed does not blink away from them. It understands, in rare and terrifying way, the mental toll of feeling like either an exile or a dangerous apostate within one’s faith community, alienated both from a caring God and from the platitudes that seem to satisfy others in the pews — of becoming convinced that if you’re not frightened then you’re purposely shutting yourself off from reality. It knows the special existential terror of trying to pray without being sure that God is listening, in a world where the nonexistence of God seems just as plausible as the alternative.

In this respect, First Reformed would pair well with Martin Scorsese’s 2016 film Silence — no surprise, since Scorsese and Schrader have a long association. Schrader wrote Taxi Driver, which Scorsese directed, and Scorsese also declared Diary of a Country Priest to be an influence on Taxi Driver, which, like First Reformed, leans on its main character’s narration. Schrader has said that he had half an inkling to make Silence himself when it looked like Scorsese might never manage to pull it off.

Maybe with First Reformed, he has. Not that this film is a clone of Scorsese’s — Silence is set in the 17th century and focuses on two Portuguese Jesuit priests on a mission to Japan, whereas First Reformed is contemporary, set in upstate New York, among Protestants. And while Silence is powerful and elegiac, First Reformed, though smaller in scope — it’s more of a chamber piece than Scorsese’s sweeping epic — packs a punch that might be the more bruising of the two for its concentrated force. Silence is set in a world we can imagine; First Reformed is set in a world we know.

But both films revolve around the same question: What if you predicated your life on God’s existence, and then God turned out to be silent, crowded out by bodily discomfort, broken relationships, plundered dreams, and external forces more interested in their own power than the unsettling implications of Jesus’s teachings?

First Reformed is a deeply faith-soaked film. It embodies Schrader’s “transcendental style,” creating a world in which ordinary objects — a gravestone, a cup of whiskey, a simple hat in a gift shop — are only the visible elements of a world pulsing with meaning.

But it is not a movie that will please those who flock to God’s Not Dead and faith-based films with happy endings. It is not, in any way, inspirational.

It’s also a tale of total impending apocalypse, both personal and global. Michael’s concern, and eventually Toller’s too, is that man has gone too far in dominating and exhausting the earth’s resources, and that there’s no coming back. The apocalypse is coming, and it’s being hastened by forces like Ed Balq, the local mogul and business owner who donates megabucks to Abundant Life and, because he is bankrolling the First Reformed 250th anniversary “re-consecration” service, demands there not be “anything political” during the ceremony.

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First Reformed frames this in terms of sin. “Will God forgive us?” is the film’s refrain — first from Michael to Toller, then from Toller to Balq, and finally in lettering Toller places on First Reformed’s church marquee. The question grows on Toller, and its open-ended nature is what makes it especially unnerving. Who are the “us” that need forgiving? What do we need forgiving for? And when would that forgiveness happen? Would we need to ask for it? Are we all culpable?

First Reformed answers exactly zero of these questions, but it has the guts to raise them and to puncture, bruise, and bloodlet in search of the answers. Like Toller, the film is controlled and inexorable, until it’s not. It’s a remarkable addition to the small but growing canon of American films that aren’t afraid to stare straight into an abyss with all of the implications — moral, ethical, political, and religious — that are required for this moment in our history. First Reformed is a confounding stunner of a movie and richly deserves our full, serious attention.

First Reformed opened in limited release on May 18 and will roll out in more theaters in the coming weeks.

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