Forty-five years later, Paul Schrader has finally crossed that bridge as a filmmaker with First Reformed. After a career spent making movies that strayed far from the transcendental template, he has now made one in which the influence of the great directors he studied can be felt in every frame. Reverend Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke), the pastor in a small Dutch Reformed church in Upstate New York, decides to keep a journal for one year in an echo of Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1951), and his crisis of faith is exacerbated when a militant young activist, Michael (Philip Ettinger), fills his head with thoughts of impending environmental disaster, just as the priest in Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light (1963) was disturbed by China’s development of the atom bomb. First Reformed recalls those films stylistically too; its stark framing, measured pacing and all-round austerity being a million miles away from the anything-goes anarchy of Schrader’s prior film, the gleefully offensive crime comedy Dog Eat Dog (2016), starring Nicolas Cage. "No, no, no, that's not me,” Schrader would always tell people who expected his interests as a critic to be reflected in his movies. “You'll never catch me on that thin Bressonian ice." So how did he end up here?
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