The film opens with a dark screen, amidst palpable silence. As minimal intro credits come and go, a small light begins to wax top-centre. The broader image unfurls unadorned, revealing a white cross atop a picturesque, old church building, reflecting the sunlight. The camera slowly tracks up the drive. There are no cuts, no embellishments, just the image growing in frame over a long, patient take. The framing of the film is square, 1.37:1 or Academy ratio to be precise, rather than the expansive wide-screen most modern viewers are used to. This square framing at once forces me to carefully attend to what is right in front of me, while creating a sense of “boxed-in-ness.” The building is historic, beautiful. And yet I am left with a sense of unease I can’t quite place.

I first experienced First Reformed in a small London cinema a few years ago. 

It has wonderfully haunted me ever since.

Written and directed by Paul Schrader, the film centres around Ethan Hawke’s Reverend Ernst Toller, the ailing minister of an historic Dutch Reformed church in upstate New York, who is suffering what St John of The Cross calls “the dark night of the soul.” Hawke’s performance is a career best, alongside a small and excellent supporting cast, and Schrader’s script is spellbinding in its piercing economy. 

Even at a cursory glance one might immediately assume that the movie deals with spiritual and religious ideas. And indeed, much of the film’s content resonates with some of the contours of the spiritual life: endurance amidst suffering, wrestling in prayer, silence, stillness, the slow attending to everyday things, unease that longs for resolution and, just maybe, the breaking in of the Transcendent Other when we least expect it.

This is certainly true for the film’s plot, dialogue and onscreen action, and yet there is something unspoken, something intrinsic that goes much deeper than the surface content.

You see, as I was later to learn, I was being introduced through First Reformed to a type of cinema called Transcendental Style or “spiritual cinema,” which is extensively explored by Paul Schrader in his seminal 1972 work, Transcendental Style in Film. For Schrader and the masters of Transcendental Style upon whom he draws — Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson and Carl Dreyer — spiritual cinema, like the spiritual life itself, is “experiential, not expositional.” This conviction is manifest in the defining characteristic of the Transcendental Style: a prioritising of form over content as the vehicle driving the film. Rather than through overt dialogue, plot or action, it employs a set of film-making techniques and leverages certain style choices and aesthetics to evoke (invoke?) the experience of the spiritual life.

Schrader himself, in his definitive study, lays out some of the techniques used in Transcendental Style: long takes, wide angles, static frames, “boxed” screen ratio, very little to no composed music, minimal camera angle coverage, offset edits, diegetic sound effects, repeated composition, and others. These techniques create space, through time and subverted expectation, for the spiritual: for stillness, silence and contemplation, while at the same time building tension — creating “a sense of unease the viewer must resolve.”

Every one of these stylistics is employed throughout First Reformed to profound effect.

Long takes slow us down, forcing us to almost indwell and attend carefully to what is occurring on screen. Schroder comments that Robert Bresson, one of the fathers of Transcendental Style, in his work, “made ‘waiting’ a verb,” and that as a style it is “a mile marker on the journey toward stillness.”