Le Diable probablement...
The three best films I've seen so far this year all centre on middle-aged men experiencing physical-cum-psychological breakdowns while on personal missions of one sort or another. I'm not sure whether this says more about the state of arthouse cinema in 2018 –– deliberately anti-superhero movies? –– or just about the state of my idiosyncratic tastes and preferences. Lucretia Martel's
Zama is the most beautiful, the most open and immersive, and probably the best of the three. Lynne Ramsay's
You Were Never Really Here is the most sealed-off and cryptic; despite my admiration of the film and especially of Joaquin Phoenix's performance, I can't claim to be able to make heads or tails of it.
Paul Schrader's
First Reformed is the darkest and most upsetting, not least because Schrader casts a superb Ethan Hawke (one of my favorite actors, though I can scarcely separate him from Jesse in the
Before... trilogy and the dad in
Boyhood) as his suffering leading man.
First Reformed really feels like the culmination and apotheosis of all things Schrader–-not just his own filmography as a screenwriter and/or director (this is obviously of a piece with
Taxi Driver,
Hardcore,
Last Temptation of Christ,
Affliction, etc.) but also his influential work as a theorist of film style, with unmistakable echoes of Bresson, Dreyer, Bergman, and Laughton's
Night of the Hunter, among other key touchstones. Occasionally, these cinephilic references are a slight distraction (more often, they're effective), and in certain places, Schrader's film feels a touch too allegorically schematic or politically on-the-nose. But its flaws in no way lessen its total, seismic impact. Rather, a subtler, more elegant, more "perfect" version of this film would not be as flooring, and despairing, an experience. It's some kind of peculiar masterpiece.
