First Reformed

First Reformed (2018) is a slow-burn American drama written and directed by Paul Schrader — watch it online on iFILM. Ethan Hawke plays Reverend Toller, a former army chaplain still mourning a son he sent to war, now tending a near-empty upstate New York church and writing his thoughts in a private journal as though putting himself on trial.

His equilibrium cracks when he counsels Mary, a pregnant parishioner whose radical environmentalist husband has just taken his own life. Toller absorbs the man's rage at a world being destroyed and finds it fusing with his own grief. Amanda Seyfried carries much of the film with near-silence, the one force keeping Toller from the edge.

Schrader drew on Bresson and Bergman to build something stripped and pitiless — a portrait of faith, complicity, and a man deciding whether despair is reason enough to act. Stream First Reformed (2018) on iFILM.