First Reformed

First Reformed is a good movie. It's unsettling and interesting. It overtly references both Robert Bresson and Andrei Tarkovsky, and I was interested in the idea that the crisis of global warming might be somehow linked with Christianity in some way.

And then Paul Schrader's film ends abruptly and in a way that doesn't work – or at least didn't work for me. My flatmate and I  looked up some explanations of the film's ending, and they do sort of explain things, but it still doesn't work for me (and not because the ending is about redemption or salvation but because that redemption is achieved through romance).

As regards the acting: Philip Ettinger is great in his couple of scenes, and I loved seeing Cedric the Entertainer in a very different kind of role. That was really fun. But Ethan Hawke... I dunno. He feels like he's working really hard the whole time. I always feel this with Hawke. The effort he's expending to play his characters is more evident to me than the characters themselves. And this closes Hawke's characters off from me in a way that makes them difficult to believe or identify with.

First Reformed is certainly interesting. And I obviously think a film like this – that tries something strange – is much much better than a Hollywood by-the-book kind of thing like Bohemian Rhapsody, but I didn't love First Reformed, and for me its ending undermined a lot of what it attempted to achieve.