First Reformed – 7

This will win the award for darkest film of the year (I hope). Ethan Hawke was riveting, although I wish he had had a bit more presence to begin with. He never seemed to fill his pastoral robes, so didn’t convince me of what he used to have been. We came upon him already subject to doubts and well into the bottle. Was that really a Neil Young song they sang at the eco-terrorist’s funeral? – it was. Would he really have known how to detonate a suicide vest? – we’ll never know. Like a polluted river, the movie split into four or five conceivable endings as it reached the delta, but that’s not where we were supposed to focus.