When Paul Schrader’s new moral drama The Basics of Philosophy begins, we are on a fictional college campus where John (Jack Huston), a professor of philosophy, gives an introductory lecture about the meaning of his course. Soon after, we see him in his office with a female student, who is begging for a grade change. She makes a clumsy attempt at seduction that he rebuffs, but the charged moment lingers in the air for several scenes afterward. I braced myself, concerned that we might be in store for a version of After the Hunt from a male perspective, or an attempt to yoke the older attitudes of, say, David Mamet’s Oleanna to the more modern cultural and sexual wars of academia that have roiled for over a decade now. When an 80-year-old man sets a film at a college in 2026, there might be reason to worry.
But Schrader is not just any 80-year-old man. He’s a deep thinker, something of a philosopher and theologian himself, forever trying to reconcile his deeply religious upbringing with all the challenges that worldview has faced in his many years of life. Schrader’s recent films, beginning with 2017’s First Reformed, have been pensive, offbeat mullings-over of the sociopolitical turned personal. First Reformed is (among other things) about a man grappling with climate change dread. In 2021’s The Card Counter, a man contends with a gnarly history of military torture. And in 2022’s Master Gardener, yet another of Schrader’s “men in a room” works to shed the white supremacist ideology he once held. Schrader, it seems, has been trying to process the world as it’s become, just as he is on his way out of it.
