10 / 10
Official trailer
A Film About Despair and Grace
First Reformed is a film about a man slowly coming apart, and few American films of the last twenty years hit as hard. It moves at a patient, deliberate pace, in long, still shots and quiet conversations, and its subjects are the largest ones there are: faith, despair, guilt, the destruction of the natural world and whether God will forgive us for what we’ve done to it.
Paul Schrader wrote and directed it, and it premiered in 2017 and opened widely in 2018. Schrader, who wrote Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, had spent decades writing about lonely men on the edge of violence, and this is the purest expression of that obsession.
It earned him his first Academy Award nomination, more than forty years after Taxi Driver. My rating is a 10. It’s demanding, unsettling and unforgettable.
This film flattened me. I think it’s the bravest thing Schrader has made, a quiet movie about a small-town pastor that frightened me more than most horror films, and Toller is a character I can’t get out of my head. It’s slow, and I wouldn’t cut a frame of it.
Reverend Toller
Ethan Hawke plays Reverend Ernst Toller, the pastor of First Reformed, a small Dutch Reformed church in upstate New York that’s about to celebrate its two hundred and fiftieth anniversary. The church was once a stop on the Underground Railroad, and it now survives as a tourist attraction, owned and funded by a nearby evangelical megachurch. Almost nobody comes to Sunday services, and the gift shop sees more visitors than the pews.
Toller is a former military chaplain whose son was killed in Iraq after Toller encouraged him to enlist. His marriage collapsed, and he lives alone, drinking heavily and ignoring a worsening illness. He keeps a diary, writing each entry by hand for a year before he intends to destroy it, and his voice narrates the film, calm, precise and increasingly troubled.
Hawke gives the finest performance of his career.
His Toller is gentle, intelligent and deeply wounded, a man who speaks the language of faith fluently and can no longer feel it. Every emotion is held back, and the restraint makes the moments when it breaks through overwhelming. A single tear, a flash of anger or a trembling hand says more than any speech could.
What impresses me is how little Hawke does. I kept waiting for Toller to break, and when the crack finally shows it’s a tear or a shaking hand, and I felt it in my chest. I’d put this at the top of everything Hawke has done.
For Writers
Toller’s diary gives the film its voice: calm, precise and increasingly troubled. We hear his thoughts as he records them, and we watch the gap between what he writes and what he does.
A diary or journal lets a narrator reveal their inner life directly, and it creates dramatic irony when their words and actions diverge.
Try writing part of your story as your protagonist’s private journal. Let the reader notice what the character doesn’t admit, even to themselves.
Mary and Michael
After a service, a young pregnant woman named Mary, played by Amanda Seyfried, asks Toller to speak to her husband, Michael. Michael is an environmental activist who has fallen into despair about climate change and wants Mary to end her pregnancy, because he can’t bear to bring a child into a dying world.
Toller visits Michael, and their conversation is the film’s first great scene. Michael lays out the evidence of catastrophe calmly and relentlessly, and Toller, who has come to offer hope, finds that he has no good answer. The pastor argues for courage and faith in the face of uncertainty, and the words sound hollow even to him.
That conversation is the reason I’d give this film a 10 even if the rest were ordinary. I respect Schrader for letting his hero lose the argument outright, and I found myself with no better answer than Toller had.
Shortly afterwards, Michael takes his own life. His death changes Toller deeply. He inherits Michael’s anger, his research and his sense of urgency, and he begins to ask whether the church, and he himself, have any right to stay silent while the world is poisoned. His quiet sermons start to carry an edge that unsettles his tiny congregation.
For Writers
Michael lays out the evidence for despair, and Toller, who came to offer hope, has no good answer. The scene is powerful because the hero loses the argument.
Write a scene where your protagonist faces a challenge to their deepest belief and has no convincing reply. Let that failure drive the rest of the story.
When your protagonist’s beliefs are tested, letting them lose the argument can be more powerful than letting them win. The doubt becomes the story.
The Megachurch
Abundant Life, a huge, modern evangelical church led by Pastor Joel Jeffers, played by Cedric Kyles, known as Cedric the Entertainer, keeps First Reformed alive. Jeffers is warm, practical and successful, a man who believes in his mission and in the business of running a church, and his relationship with Toller is kind but increasingly strained.
Abundant Life depends on donations from Edward Balq, a wealthy industrialist whose company is one of the region’s worst polluters. Balq is funding the anniversary celebration, and he has no time for talk of environmental responsibility, least of all from a pastor he regards as a hired caretaker. When Toller begins to speak about it, the pressure to stay quiet becomes intense.
Kyles is excellent in a rare dramatic role, and Jeffers is never a villain, even when he urges Toller to take a break and see a doctor.
He’s a decent man who has made practical compromises, and the film’s point is that those compromises, multiplied across a whole church and a whole society, have made complicity feel normal. Nobody in the film is evil. The damage comes from ordinary people doing what seems sensible.
A Diary and a Descent
As the anniversary approaches, Toller’s health deteriorates, his drinking worsens and his thoughts grow darker. His diary entries become more fervent, and the film charts, with terrifying calm, the gradual transformation of despair into a plan for violence. He comes to see an act of destruction at the reconsecration service as the only moral response left to him.
The film never makes this easy to watch or easy to dismiss.
Toller’s reasoning follows a grim logic, drawn from his grief, his guilt, his illness and his anger at a world that seems to have abandoned the earth. The audience understands how he reached this point. That understanding is the most frightening thing in the film.
Schrader has said the film draws on the tradition of lonely, self-destructive men in his earlier work, and Toller is a spiritual cousin of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver: a man alone in a room, writing in a journal, preparing for a terrible act he believes is righteous. The difference is that Toller is a man of God. His descent is all the more troubling for it.
For Writers
Toller’s descent follows a grim logic, and the audience understands how he reached his plan. That understanding is more frightening than any villain.
If your character is heading toward a dark decision, show each step of their reasoning in a way the reader can follow, even while fearing where it leads. A character who moves toward a terrible act is more disturbing when the reader can follow their reasoning step by step. Comprehension creates dread.
Bresson, Bergman and Dreyer
Schrader wrote a famous book, Transcendental Style in Film, about the spiritual cinema of Robert Bresson, Yasujirō Ozu and Carl Theodor Dreyer, and for decades he said he would never make such a film himself. First Reformed is the film he finally made, and it’s full of their influence, from its structure to its images.
The story echoes Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest, about a sick young priest keeping a journal, and Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light, about a pastor who has lost his faith and fails to comfort a man in despair. Schrader uses a boxy, almost square frame, long static shots and very little music, creating an austere, contemplative style that asks the audience to look and listen closely.
The austerity isn’t coldness. It clears away distraction so that every gesture, every word and every small change in Toller’s face carries enormous weight. By the final act, the audience is watching Hawke’s eyes the way a congregation watches a preacher, waiting for a sign of what he will do next.
The Magical Mystery Tour
In the middle of the film, there’s an extraordinary sequence that breaks the austere style completely. Mary asks Toller to lie down with her on the floor, as she used to with Michael, and the two of them begin to levitate, floating through space and over landscapes, first beautiful and then polluted and ruined.
It’s a mystical, dreamlike scene, set to an eerie, drifting soundscape, and it’s either a vision, a shared act of grace or a moment of madness, and the film doesn’t say which. It’s the one moment where Toller seems to touch something transcendent, a glimpse of the grace he has been praying for, and it’s followed immediately by images of the earth’s destruction, as if even his vision can’t escape the despair.
The levitation is the one place where I part ways with the film a little. I admire the nerve of it, and I still find the shift so abrupt that for a minute I stopped believing in the room. It’s my only complaint, and it’s a small one.
Mary at the Door
Few recent endings have been argued over this much. As the reconsecration service begins, Toller is preparing to carry out his plan when Mary unexpectedly arrives at the church. Seeing her, he abandons his plan and turns toward her in anguish, as the hymn Leaning on the Everlasting Arms plays, and the two embrace in a long, passionate, whirling kiss as the image cuts abruptly to black.
Is it a miracle, an act of grace that saves Toller at the last moment?
Or is it a final hallucination, the dying fantasy of a man who has already carried out his despair? Schrader has refused to explain, and the film supports both readings. The sudden cut to black leaves the audience suspended, shocked and uncertain.
Schrader was right never to explain it. I lean toward the grimmer reading myself, and I think the film is braver for letting me choose and then making me live with the choice.
The ambiguity is deliberate. First Reformed ends where Toller’s struggle has been all along, between hope and despair, and it leaves the audience to decide which one won. Few recent films have trusted their viewers this completely, or left them with so much to argue about on the way home.
Faith and the Climate
The climate crisis gets more serious treatment in First Reformed than in almost any other film, and the film frames it not as a political issue but as a moral and spiritual one. Its central question, whether God will forgive us for what we’re doing to the earth, is asked directly, first by Michael and then by Toller himself, and the film refuses to offer comforting answers.
It’s also a portrait of loneliness, grief and the fragility of faith, carried by one of the finest performances in modern American cinema. Hawke, Seyfried and Kyles are all excellent, and Schrader’s direction is controlled, precise and unafraid. The film stays with you for days, and one that grows richer on a second viewing.
Who It’s For
Slow, somber and deeply disturbing, First Reformed deals directly with suicide, despair and the contemplation of violence. Viewers expecting a conventional thriller or a comforting drama will find it challenging, and its ending will frustrate anyone who wants clear answers. This is a film to be absorbed. It gets a 10. Watch it with full attention, preferably without distractions, and be ready for a film that asks hard questions and refuses to look away. It’s an essential American film of its decade, and a hard one to shake off once the lights come up.
Craft Note
Craft Note
It strips away almost everything, music, camera movement and incident, so that the smallest changes in a man’s face and voice carry enormous weight. Its austerity makes it overwhelming.
Restraint can amplify emotion. When a story avoids big gestures, the small ones become enormous, and the reader leans in to catch them.
Try writing a key scene with almost no action, description or dialogue tags. Let a few precise details and silences carry the emotion, and trust the reader to feel it.
The Verdict on First Reformed
It’s a 10, and I’d hold it up against any American film of its decade. Ethan Hawke gives the finest performance of his career, Schrader finally makes the film he spent his life writing toward, and it asks whether God will forgive us for the earth without handing me an easy answer. The levitation jars me a little, and that small wobble doesn’t come close to denting the rest.
