First Reformed (2018) - Life Without...

★★★★☆

If you’re curious, First Reformed is the name of a historical church where Ethan Hawke’s Toller is given a job as a pastor. He looks organized and restrained, but deep down he’s wrestling with his religious beliefs and some unbearable pain from the past. It’s like the film itself where things seem so clean and neat on the surface, but underneath it’s a rather disturbing and twisted story going on!

I don’t feel like this is a film intending to provoke with religious and ethical debates though it may sound like it as there’re loads of conversations and narrations about that. It’s more like a story of a broken soul never being able to be unbroken no matter how. Well, I guess you should never have an intention of making the broken unbroken, because you can never undo what’s done no matter how willing you’re to try and sacrifice for it. Suffering happens when you’re not accepting who you are, better or worse, but attempting to be who you once were, and be so called normal again instead!

With uses of a rare screen aspect ratio, empty space, silence and stillness, ‘First Reformed’ manages to draw your attention right from the first frame until the end where you’re left a lot to imagine. The film gives a sense of calmness and peace at first but as it develops, you’d feel like there’s a lot of emotions stacking up, waiting to go off! It’s dialogue-driven yet emotionally intense. It feels artistically beautiful and eerily creepy at the same time. And what makes it more captivating is Ethan Hawke’s performance here that is no doubt the best of his career!

The God thing is, as far as you’re concerned, kind of tricky and purposeful. From the Buddhist point of view, things outside are merely the reflections of our running mind, so it’s not God that created us. It’s us that created God! It may be offensive to say so but yes, God is what we invented to just make us feel good about the unknown and our existence! It’s all made up to just serve our ego as a matter of fact. So whether or not God will forgive us is irrelevant. How to direct and get ahold of our ego is all that matters!

‘A life without despair is a life without hope’ is one of the witty things Reverend Toller said to Mary’s husband who is being so pessimistic about the future of the planet Earth. It sounds contradictory but absolutely true. How are you supposed to know a thing without learning the opposite of it? I mean, how are you supposed to tell happiness without suffering; big without small; good without bad; right without wrong; and so on and so forth! Life is like a coin that must come with two sides. Suffering sets in when you choose to turn a blind eye to either side of it.

The ending appears to be quite weird and ambiguous, which I’ve learned to appreciate though. You can interpret it however you want. If you’re full of hope, that’s salvation. If not, that’s condemnation! ‘First Reformed’ is a film not only for the hopeful, but also the hopeless!