Paul Schrader crafted his 2018 film First Reformed to be, among other things, an extended phenomenological argument that transcendence requires moving beyond the physical world. At the same time, First Reformed does something philosophically richer and stranger than what Schrader set out to do—and its most powerful moments point toward a very different account of what transcendence can mean.
Schrader is not only the writer and director of First Reformed but also the author of an influential treatise on film theory: Transcendental Style in Film. This work provides the theoretical blueprint for a style of filmmaking that guides viewers into unfamiliar realms of conscious experience. Schrader’s argument for the relationship of the transcendent to the immanent is unambiguous: “The enemy of transcendence is immanence.” Transcendental films deploy an “austere toolkit”—a static camera, no non-diegetic sound, lingering shots that refuse to cut on action—to create a viewing experience that demands active participation. Where most movies lean toward you aggressively, transcendental movies require you to lean into them. This slow withholding creates a desire for release, which arrives in the form of what Schrader calls “the Decisive Moment”: an unexpected image or act resulting in “a stasis, an acceptance of parallel reality—transcendence.” The transcendental film director is a “spirit guide,” escorting the viewer toward the Wholly Other, something entirely outside the physical world. “The Transcendent is beyond normal sense experience,” Schrader writes, “and that which it transcends is, by definition, the immanent.”
First Reformed follows this blueprint deliberately. The film centers on Reverend Toller (Ethan Hawke), a small-church pastor consumed by existential despair over humanity’s environmental future, whose grief and rage build toward a planned act of martyrdom and then, in the final moments, collapse into an unexpected embrace. The narrative is thin by design. But there are two Decisive Moments, and I want to argue that both do something Schrader’s framework does not anticipate: rather than escorting the viewer out of the material world, they immerse us more deeply in it.
The first Decisive Moment arrives just past the ninety-minute mark. Mary (Amanda Seyfried) describes a spiritual practice she shared with her late husband: lying on top of each other, fully clothed, maximizing body-to-body contact, breathing in rhythm, staring into each other’s eyes. She asks Toller to try it with her. In a static profile shot, we watch them stretch their arms out and press their noses gently together. Mary’s hair cascades down and obscures the boundary between their faces. Then everything that has been withheld floods in. Non-diegetic sound enters for the first time—a bassy rumble, then ethereal vocals. Their bodies levitate. The camera, which has barely moved, begins to sweep around them. The shadowy room dissolves into a vast cosmic expanse, darkness studded by distant stars. From there, the background shifts to terrestrial environs: mountainscapes, forests, jungles, oceans. Throughout, the characters remain locked in their connected position, breathing in unison, the sounds of the natural world layering under the music—winds, waterways, crashing waves.
Then Toller removes his gaze from Mary’s eyes and looks out at his surroundings. The pristine landscapes immediately give way to the sounds and sights of human activity: car horns, an interstate, piles of discarded tires, smokestacks, deforestation. Mary and Toller dissolve from the scene. It is a striking moment, effective at jarring the viewer from the austerity of the surrounding film. Still, Schrader reserves the complete Decisive Moment for the film’s final shot: Toller, on the verge of ingesting a glass of poison, sees Mary appear in the doorway. He drops the glass. Music swells. They rush toward each other and embrace. The camera (again, usually static) circles around them, spinning, spinning, spinning. The screen cuts to black.
Schrader reads these moments as expressions of vertical transcendence—the viewer guided out of ordinary sense experience and toward “the Holy.” But this is precisely where his framework fails to account for an alternative reading of his film. In The Meaning of the Body, philosopher Mark Johnson, working in the tradition of William James and John Dewey, has argued directly against the dualism Schrader’s theory presupposes. “There is no body without an environment,” Johnson writes, “no body without the ongoing flow of organism-environment interaction that defines our realities.” Our emotions and affective states are not merely private, internal phenomena: “Emotions are both in us and in the world at the same time. They are, in fact, one of the most pervasive ways that we are continually in touch with our environment.” If human experience is an ongoing process continuous with nature itself, then there is nothing to transcend in Schrader’s vertical sense—and the premise of transcendental style is called into question.
What Johnson offers instead is “horizontal transcendence”: experiences of “transformative acts that change both our world and ourselves” tied to a sense of ourselves “as part of a broader human and more-than-human ongoing process in which change, creativity, and growth of meaning are possible.” Transcendence through the immanent, not away from it.
Read through Johnson, the floating scene is not an escape from material reality. It is a formal enactment of our continuity with it. We begin with the cosmos—our common material ancestry, the origin of the elements that constitute both human bodies and mountainscapes. The shift into terrestrial environments extends that continuity outward. Even the scene’s collapse—Toller’s gaze drifting to the evidence of human destruction—need not be read as a failure of transcendence. It can be read as a recognition that human affects and human effects are equally part of the natural world. We do not fall out of nature when we damage it. We are nature damaging itself.
The ending resolves what the first scene only opened. Toller’s realization—that it is his connection with another living being that makes existence meaningful—is not a transcendence of the immanent. It is a transcendence through it: an opening to the field of shared continuity Johnson describes, one that does not require leaving the body behind. The camera sweeps, the music swells, the boundaries between the characters blur. The viewer is not delivered out of immanence but thrust into it more primordially.
Schrader built a film whose formal techniques produce exactly the kind of embodied, relational awakening that his own theoretical framework was designed to transcend. Whether that is a productive contradiction or an unintended gift depends on which story about the relationship between matter and spirit you find more compelling. First Reformed makes a persuasive case that you do not have to choose.
Nich Krause
Nich Krause is a lecturer at Auburn University. His research explores the ethics of representation of bodies in the media, specifically the ways in which film and television represent fat bodies. Dr. Krause’s work has been published in Screen Bodies: The Journal of Embodiment, Media Arts, and Technology, Excessive Bodies: A Journal of Artistic and Critical Fat Praxis and Worldmaking, and Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, among other venues. Beyond teaching and researching, he enjoys baking sourdough, watching movies, and reading books with his partner, Caroline.
