'First Reformed' is a heady, haunting and challenging take on faith

Cinephiles known writer-director Paul Schrader for two things -- his occasionally brilliant often inconsistent career and his dogged fascination with matters of faith.

His best films -- Blue Collar, Hardcore, American Gigolo -- mostly came early in his career, after he struck gold with his iconic screenplay for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver.

In recent years, he's become largely the subject of ridicule, especially after the infamously trouble production of his Lindsay Lohan erotic thriller The Canyons.

Now, he's back with a film that dives headfirst into the themes he has explored before -- the damaged male psyche, loneliness, obsession, religion and despair -- but in a much more coherent and compelling vehicle than he has made in some time. In fact, many critics are hailing it as his signature masterpiece.

The audience I saw it with didn't seem to appreciate it at all. The snickered and chuckled at its earnestness and jarring shifts in tone. It is, by any measure, a challenging movie. It's a pretty quiet, slow-paced meditative movie -- with long static takes that force you to lean in and pay attention to the literate and nuanced dialogue.

After a year totally dominated by superhero and fantasy films, it feels like a total breath of fresh air to watch a film aimed squarely at adults that does not spoonfeed you and raises very provocative political ideas -- about climate change and the corruption of American churches -- without feeling even a little heavy handed, or, yes, preachy.

The movie is aided tremendously by Ethan Hawke's towering lead performance, in what might just be the best work of his career. His voice now a raspy gravel and his once boyish face weathered and looking stricken, he plays the pastor of a poorly attended church being bankrolled by a mega-ministry -- led by a very subtle Cedric the Entertainer.

After being summoned by a pregnant woman, played by Amanda Seyfried, to counsel her troubled husband, Hawke's character finds himself instead shaken by the man's plaintive, compelling question: Will God forgive us for destroying his creation?

The film then plunges into a complex and occasionally surreal journey which shows the Hawke character's spiritual crisis coinciding with his awakening as a would-be radical activist.

This is all handled in the least histrionic way possible, which adds to the movie's haunting power. Schrader has never been a filmmaker hailed for his subtlety, so it's shocking that he has laid out such a stark but sophisticated narrative, and yet this feels like the culmination of everything he's aimed to do before, and since he'd already lost such esteem in the industry, it has the revelatory vibe of someone who knew that had nothing to lose.

As decidedly uncommercial as this movie is -- and its ending will especially confound a lot of viewing seeking tidier resolution -- it really made me think a lot about the current moment where living in, where so many people feel that extremism of one form or another is the only righteous option. It's an unsettling subject, one that I can't get out of my mind several hours after seeing the film.

Who knows if First Reformed will remain in the conversation later in the year when awards talk begins, but it will certainly remain in my mind of the foreseeable future.