About

Pastor Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke) oversees a small church in upstate New York. Already struggling with alcoholism and a crisis of faith, an encounter with an environmental activist from his dwindling congregation causes him to spiral further – reshaping his beliefs and pushing him to search for redemption.

Paul Schrader’s First Reformed is a singularly clear-eyed exploration of the threat of climate change. Reworking narrative elements from Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light 1963 – itself concerned with the apocalyptic spectre of nuclear war – the film addresses the planet’s seemingly unrelenting march towards environmental catastrophe in personal, political and spiritual terms. Drawing from the formal techniques about which he wrote in his book ‘Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer’, Schrader’s intimate and deliberate filmmaking shapes a searing portrait of a man confronted with the slow end of the world.

M | Mature themes