First Reformed (2018) on Netflix
Reverend Ernst Toller keeps a journal at his 250-year-old church in upstate New York. Mary asks him to counsel her husband Michael, who wants her to end her pregnancy.
- Netflix4.1/5
- IMDb7.1/1068,474 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes93%
Trailer
Plot summary
Reverend Ernst Toller leads First Reformed, a 250-year-old Dutch Reformed church in Snowbridge, New York, once a stop on the Underground Railroad and now mostly a tourist attraction with dwindling attendance. A nearby megachurch, Abundant Life, owns it. Toller, a former military chaplain, keeps a journal he intends to destroy after a year and struggles with the death of his son, killed in the Iraq War. Mary Mensana seeks counseling from him for her husband Michael, a radical environmentalist who wants Mary, twenty weeks pregnant, to have an abortion. Michael argues that climate change will leave a child almost no inhabitable world.
In these lists: Leaving Netflix in the US: What Goes Next
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about First Reformed (2018)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Before he cast Amanda Seyfried as Mary in First Reformed, writer-director Paul Schrader had discussed giving the part to Michelle Williams.
- Schrader said Paweł Pawlikowski's film Ida led him to shoot First Reformed in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio, because that squarer frame drives the vertical lines and gets more of the human body into the picture.
- Schrader's screenplay for First Reformed was nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the 91st Academy Awards, the first Oscar nomination of his career.
