On the walk home after presenting Ida director Pawel Pawlikowski the Best Foreign Language Film award at the New York Film Critics Circle in 2014, Paul Schrader decided it was time to write the film he had refused to write his entire career. After becoming both a celebrated screenwriter in the years after his graduation from UCLA, critics and scholars have found ways to connect his work as a screenwriter and director with the book that came from his master's thesis, Transcendental Style in Cinema. And although there are bountiful connections with the films he examined as well as the aesthetic considerations of Ozu, Bresson, and Dreyer, Schrader never fully embraced the style himself. Talking with the writer and director about First Reformed (2017), Nicolas Cage mused to Schrader that the film serves as a culmination of his career. “I couldn't help but thinking all roads must have led to this moment.” These roads—nearly fifty years as a critic, scholar, screenwriter, and director—lead to the slow dolly shot toward the doorway of First Reformed that begins the film. The austere images that follow are an embrace both of Schrader's influences and of the transcendental style, withholding from the audience simple answers and emotional guidance. First Reformed leans away so that the audience may lean in.

In an interview with David Poland, when asked if his career held some consistencies, Schrader conceded that, indeed, his work as a filmmaker has a through line and that “At this particular moment, it's uniquely gratifying to see that through line come to some sort of culmination.” Some of this connective tissue is immediately apparent. His characters have known isolation and the quest for redemption.