Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
A pastor of a small church in upstate New York starts to spiral out of control after a soul-shaking encounter with an unstable environmental activist and his pregnant wife.
First Reformed is a masterwork of slow-burn spiritual dread. Schrader's screenplay is razor-sharp, weaving environmental despair, theological crisis, and personal dissolution into a genuinely profound meditation on faith and guilt. Hawke delivers a career-best performance of extraordinary restraint and interior torment, while the supporting cast matches him beat for beat. The cinematography — austere Academy ratio, locked-off frames, muted palette — is among the most deliberately composed of the decade, directly evoking Bresson and Dreyer while remaining wholly its own. The film's conception is singular: a Transcendental Style thriller that doubles as an eco-terror character study with Schrader explicitly reworking his own Taxi Driver DNA through a theological lens. The ending, however, is the one point of genuine contention — the abrupt, surrealist conclusion divides audiences and critics, feeling deliberately destabilizing but also somewhat evasive, undercutting the austere rigor that preceded it rather than resolving or transcending it.