Paul Schrader has spent decades exploring lonely men caught between righteousness and destruction. With First Reformed, he returned to that well one more time and struck something profound. Ethan Hawke plays Reverend Ernst Toller, pastor of a tiny historic church in upstate New York, who spirals into existential crisis after counseling an environmental activist consumed by despair over climate change. The film landed like a quiet earthquake, earning some of the strongest critical response of Schrader’s entire career.
What makes First Reformed so arresting is its refusal to offer easy comfort. This is a movie about a man of faith who can no longer reconcile what he believes with what he sees happening to the world. It’s slow, deliberate, and at times punishing. But for audiences willing to sit with its questions, the experience is unforgettable.
Ethan Hawke’s Career-Defining Restraint
The praise for Hawke’s performance has been nearly universal, and for good reason. He plays Toller as a man folding inward, his body deteriorating alongside his spiritual certainty. There’s a physical specificity to the performance that goes beyond acting choices. Hawke lost weight for the role, and every scene carries the weight of a man who has stopped taking care of himself because he’s not sure the effort matters anymore.
Schrader’s direction matches this restraint. The camera barely moves. Shots hold for uncomfortable lengths. The aspect ratio is narrow, almost boxy, creating a visual claustrophobia that mirrors Toller’s shrinking world. This is not a film that manipulates your emotions through technique. It trusts the material and trusts the audience to meet it where it is.
The screenplay builds its tension through journal entries and conversations rather than plot mechanics. Toller’s dialogues with the activist Michael, and later with Michael’s pregnant wife Mary, function as philosophical debates that feel lived-in rather than staged. Schrader draws on decades of thinking about Bresson, Bergman, and Dreyer, but the film never feels like an academic exercise. The despair is too real for that.
Amanda Seyfried brings a quiet warmth to Mary that serves as the film’s emotional counterweight. Her scenes with Hawke have a tenderness that makes the darker material bearable. Cedric the Entertainer, cast against type as the pragmatic megachurch pastor Jeffers, adds an unexpected layer of complexity to the film’s examination of how modern Christianity negotiates with corporate power.
The Ending That Divides Every Room
The film’s final act has generated more debate than almost anything else in recent American cinema. Without revealing specifics, Schrader makes a series of choices in the last fifteen minutes that split audiences cleanly. Some find the ending transcendent, a genuine spiritual experience captured on film. Others feel it undercuts everything the movie has built toward, introducing a tonal shift that feels unearned.
This division extends to the film’s pacing in general. First Reformed moves at the speed of prayer, which is exactly what some viewers need and exactly what others can’t tolerate. There are long stretches where very little happens externally, and the film asks you to find the drama in Toller’s internal landscape. For some, this creates an almost hypnotic experience. For others, the film simply tests their patience.
The environmental themes, while central to the story’s mechanism of crisis, occasionally feel slightly underdeveloped. The film is more interested in what ecological despair does to a person of faith than in the specifics of the crisis itself. This is a reasonable artistic choice, but it means the political dimensions of the story sometimes feel more like a backdrop than a fully explored element.
Schrader’s austere style, while powerful, also means the film can feel emotionally distant at times. You admire what it’s doing more than you feel what it’s doing, at least until the final scenes crack that reserve wide open. This is a feature of the filmmaking, not a bug, but it does limit the film’s accessibility.
A Spiritual Crisis Made Visceral
The key thing to understand about First Reformed is that it treats spiritual doubt with the same seriousness that most films reserve for physical danger. Toller’s crisis of faith isn’t a subplot or a character quirk. It’s the entire engine of the movie. When he asks whether God will forgive us for destroying creation, the question carries the weight of centuries of theological debate, compressed into one man’s breaking point.
This is what separates First Reformed from other films about faith. It doesn’t arrive at reassurance. It doesn’t debunk belief either. It sits in the uncertainty and asks whether that uncertainty might be the most honest form of faith available to us now.
Should You Watch First Reformed?
If you’re drawn to contemplative cinema that treats big questions with the seriousness they deserve, First Reformed is essential viewing. Fans of Schrader’s earlier work, particularly Taxi Driver (which he wrote), will recognize the DNA here, though this film operates at a more openly spiritual register. Anyone who values performance-driven drama will find Hawke’s work here impossible to look away from.
Skip it if you need narrative momentum to stay engaged, or if films that sit with despair without resolving it leave you frustrated. This is not a movie that holds your hand or tells you what to think. It makes demands on its audience and offers no guarantee of catharsis.
The Verdict on First Reformed
First Reformed is the film Paul Schrader spent his entire career building toward. It distills his lifelong obsessions into something lean, fierce, and uncompromising. Ethan Hawke delivers a performance that should define how we remember his career. The film isn’t for everyone, and its final moments will continue generating arguments for years. But for those who connect with it, First Reformed doesn’t just provoke thought. It changes the way you think about movies, faith, and what happens when a person confronts the possibility that hope itself might be a lie.