First Reformed
First Reformed
A pastor's life spirals out of control after a soul-shaking encounter with an activist and his wife.
CrossCutCritic reviewedMay 5, 2025
The Cross as Crisis, the Crisis as Cross
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There are films about faith. And then there are films that stare into the abyss where faith used to be.
Paul Schrader’s First Reformed is the latter.
It is not a film about belief as sentiment or spirituality as uplift. It is a film about belief as agony—when the soul has grown thin and brittle, and God has stopped answering.
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The central figure is Reverend Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke), a once-promising pastor now marooned in a dying church, speaking to a congregation of tourists and ghosts. He keeps a journal, like Kierkegaard in a Calvinist hangover, chronicling the slow unraveling of his body, mind, and certainty.
Toller meets Michael, an environmental activist tormented by despair. Michael sees only apocalypse ahead—and begs to know: How can we bring a child into a world so doomed?
Toller offers theology. Michael chooses death.
And something in Toller breaks.
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What follows is not a sermon. It is a descent. Not into unbelief—but into belief without grace.
Toller begins to absorb the pain of the world without a cross to carry it. He takes the burden on himself. He isolates. Suffers. Plots.
He turns, like Luther warned, inward: incurvatus in se—curved in upon the self.
And it nearly kills him.
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But then comes Mary. A young widow. Not pious. Not doctrinal. But present. Open. Quietly luminous.
She brings to Toller not answers, but presence. Not doctrine, but intimacy.
And in one astonishing moment—midway between mystical and human— they levitate. No explanation. No interpretation. Just weightlessness.
As if grace, uninvited, slipped in through the cracks.
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The film does not end in triumph. It ends in a suspended moment—between martyrdom and embrace, between suicide and surrender.
And in that stillness, it poses the real question: Can you carry the pain of the world without trying to become its savior?
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First Reformed is a cruciform film, but not the kind sold in bookstores. It is the kind carved in flesh and silence.
It shows us a faith that bleeds. A God who seems gone. A man who tries to die for the world— until he realizes Someone already did.
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POSTSCRIPT: If you found something holy or haunting in First Reformed, consider exploring these kindred reflections on grace and ruin:
The Tree of Life (Malick)
Winter Light (Bergman)
The Safety of Objects (Gross)
Brave the Dark (Larsen)
Mickey 17 (Bong)
Each of them carries a question, and none of them answer it cheaply.