The Transcendental Style in the Films of Paul Schrader: Grace and Redemption in FIRST REFORMED (US 2017), THE CARD COUNTER (US 2021) and MASTER GARDENER (US 2022)

Abstract

The career of Paul Schrader is an unusual case in the often-pragmatic US film industry. Schrader coined the term “transcendental style in film” as a theorist in the early 1970s, and when he became a filmmaker shortly thereafter, he tended to create redemptive stories of a distinctly spiritual nature, evidently influenced by his strict Calvinist upbringing. This article examines Schrader's filmography several decades later, offering a film analysis of the trilogy known as Man in a Room, which consists of FIRST REFORMED (US 2017), THE CARD COUNTER (US 2021), and MASTER GARDENER (US 2022). The study first established the qualities of the transcendental style, to provide a basis for determining whether the aesthetics and narratives of Schrader's later films reveal a concern for the transcendent. We determine that the trilogy explores the internal conflicts of middle-aged men who are burdened with a strong sense of guilt and who end up accepting the grace that arrives through (romantic) love. Furthermore, all three films contain defining elements of the transcendental style, although the filmmaker’s desire to reach a mass audiences causes him to use filters typical of commercial cinema and to draw significantly on the sociopolitical circumstances in which the protagonists live.