Bible-bashing Hawke is a revelation in this tale of redemption
ETHAN HAWKE stars as an American minister in spiritual crisis in First Reformed, an eccentric and peculiarly gripping film from veteran director Paul Schrader. The drama’s road from doubt to certainty is a messy, convoluted and very human one. Hawke is Ernst Toller, pastor of an old Dutch Reformed white clapboard church more visited by tourists than believers, but that suits his solitary contemplation and hard drinking just fine. His soldier son has been killed in a pointless war, and Toller is searching for shreds of meaning. A younger environmental activist and father-to-be Michael (Philip Ettinger) visits Toller, and seems suicidal about the future of the polluted earth. The pastor treats him with honesty, rather than the happy-clappy cheer of the mega-church which overseas his parish. Soon Michael’s heavily pregnant wife Mary (clue!) finds herself alone and — guess what? — she’s played by the gorgeous Amanda Seyfried of Mamma Mia fame. She, too, is looking for answers from the church, and its celibate pastor. They are two lost souls who don’t believe in platitudes, but long for transcendence. Schrader shoots the film in a wintry, desolate style, in dull beige and grey, only broken by the pink of Pepto Bismol in Toller’s whisky as he fights stomach cramps. Many critics have taken First Reformed very seriously as a deep inquiry into religious belief, but much of it has a black-comic touch. After all, Schrader is also the writer of Taxi Driver. Hawke’s performance is superb, as he white-knuckles his way through the Bible and wastes away like a visionmaddened saint. One joyous and completely unpredictable scene will leave you gasping, as the film makes a clever U-turn towards the end.
STILL on the spiritual plane, The Secret Of Marrowbone is a mystery told with so many reverse-ferret plot twists that the whole haunted house premise eventually collapses. George MacKay tries his best as 20-
year-old Jack, the eldest of four siblings who are on the run from their psychotic father in England in 1969. Their ailing mother brings them to her decrepit wooden home in the American countryside, and promptly dies. The kids decide to hide this fact so they can stay together as a family until Jack can be their guardian, once he reaches 21. Meanwhile, the old Marrowbone house starts creaking and quivering. Cracks and stains appear in the ceiling. Mirrors are covered as fiveyear-old Sam (Matthew Stagg) quakes with fear of apparitions, and his siblings Billy (Charlie Heaton) and Jane (Mia Goth) begin to freak out too as their father’s presence makes itself felt. Anya Taylor-Joy pops up as a librarian and love interest, but none of the characters aside from Jack are more than sketched out, and a talented young cast is wasted. The revelations are nasty, but slow to unfurl. The film manages to combine a Five-Go-Mad, Enid Blyton innocence with rather wishy-washy scares, which will satisfy neither horror fans, nor a young adult audience.