{"id":672850,"date":"2026-09-04T20:53:16","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T20:53:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/672850\/"},"modified":"2026-09-04T20:53:16","modified_gmt":"2026-09-04T20:53:16","slug":"the-basics-of-philosophy-review-jack-huston-in-paul-schrader-drama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/672850\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The Basics of Philosophy’ Review: Jack Huston in Paul Schrader Drama"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tWhen Paul Schrader<\/a>\u2019s new moral drama The Basics of Philosophy begins, we are on a fictional college campus where John (Jack Huston<\/a>), 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<\/a> from a male perspective, or an attempt to yoke the older attitudes of, say, David Mamet\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBut Schrader is not just any 80-year-old man. He\u2019s 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\u2019s recent films, beginning with 2017\u2019s First Reformed<\/a>, 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\u2019s The Card Counter<\/a>, a man contends with a gnarly history of military torture. And in 2022\u2019s Master Gardener<\/a>, yet another of Schrader\u2019s \u201cmen in a room\u201d works to shed the white supremacist ideology he once held. Schrader, it seems, has been trying to process the world as it\u2019s become, just as he is on his way out of it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tThe Basics of Philosophy\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n

\tAnother clumsy but compelling entry from a filmmaker like no other.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tVenue:<\/strong> Venice Film Festival (Venice Open \u2014 Out of Competition)
Cast:<\/strong> Jack Huston, Sofia Boutella, Bill Pullman, Daniel Zavatto, Shiloh Fernandez, Karl Glusman
Director and writer:<\/strong> Paul Schrader
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t1 hour 34 minutes\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tThere is slightly less newsy topicality to The Basics of Philosophy. Instead, it turns even more inward, staging a struggle for John\u2019s soul as a past sin comes to bear on his present life. (It\u2019s impossible to write about this movie without giving away some pretty major plot details, so stop here if you are spoiler-averse.) When his father (Bill Pullman<\/a>) dies, John spots a lone man at the funeral, someone he seems to recognize but can\u2019t quite place. We eventually learn that when John was younger \u2014 but still an adult \u2014 he committed a sexual assault on an underage boy, the son of his family\u2019s gardener who was essentially paid off in exchange for his silence. Seeing this figure years later sparks a sudden, intense need to get something like closure from the now grown man, Miguel (Daniel Zovatto), partly as an act of contrition, but quite possibly driven by desire, too.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tJohn is in the long, agonizing process of writing a book about Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century Jewish apostate and stoic who was one of the pioneers of rationalism, and who mightily influenced the entire course of philosophical thinking for centuries. Spinoza\u2019s work is famously difficult to grasp, which is perhaps why John seems so stymied in his writing. Here he is, trying to rationalize that which maybe can\u2019t be, both in his wrestling with Spinoza\u2019s texts and with himself \u2014 his past predatory actions, his still conflicted sexuality, his relationships with his late father and with a fellow professor (Sofia Boutella<\/a>) and her 14-year-old son.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSchrader approaches some pretty tetchy, third-rail territory, doing some debating about whether one act of child abuse means that John is, inherently, a child abuser by nature. One gets the discomfiting sense that Schrader is conflating that kind of illicit sexual activity with that of consenting, adult gay men, a line blurred as John finds himself drawn to a local gay bar and engaging in a seemingly satisfying one-night stand with a local hustler (Shiloh Fernandez). But I think Schrader is using homosexuality as a stand-in for broader societal transgression, rather than attempting to examine gay identity specifically.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAt least, I hope that\u2019s the case, as his writing in the film\u2019s gay interludes is clunky and dated, in terms of both basic mechanicals like cruising and the more ineffable modes of queer behavior. Schrader is not exactly treating the subject matter as lurid, though, yes, he could probably draw a finer distinction between the act of molesting a 14-year-old and picking up a stranger at a bar. But I suppose the point is that John is struggling to find that distinction for himself, that something darker than he will ever speak aloud \u2014 or, maybe, ever act on again \u2014 might churn within him as he tries to maintain the resolve to live a decent, upstanding and therefore nobly repressed life.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThat sense of propriety was partly imposed upon him by his father, who, in covering up John\u2019s misdeed, placed an albatross around his son\u2019s neck, demanding his conformity to a narrow sort of principle. Now, with his father gone, John seems uncertain what to do with that weight, and with the weight of existence entirely \u2014 he\u2019s been researching a painless method of suicide online, finding a potion that brings to mind Socrates\u2019 hemlock.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSo, yes, this is heavy stuff, and one is tempted to roll one\u2019s eyes at the film\u2019s starchy presentation of its conflicts and its ideas, its frequently stilted dialogue and deliberate pacing. But then again, Schrader\u2019s brand of Big Thought earnestness is rare these days; he is one of the few remaining practitioners of a fading artistic tradition, which knows nothing of \u2014 or at least has no use for \u2014 irony and meta self-effacement. Schrader has matters of change and expiation on his mind, and so he has written a blunt, unflinching story of exactly those things, with an ending that is quite shocking in its refusal to let us look away from the film\u2019s direst suggestions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSome viewers might read something exonerating in the way Schrader humanizes John\u2019s turmoil, particularly in how the film seems to empathize with John as he strains under the tight restrictions that he, and society, have put on his sexual nature. Others might see the film another way, as a reckless claim that many (if not all) men would molest children were all the reins of civilization cut loose. Neither of those interpretations would be entirely invalid, exactly, and yet The Basics of Philosophy \u2014 ironically enough, given its title \u2014 mostly evades any such moral didacticism. The film is instead, in its strange and sometimes plodding manner, a call to simply sit and think about the contradictions of human character. Which has maybe been the great project of Schrader\u2019s fascinating and singular career.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Paul Schrader\u2019s new moral drama The Basics of Philosophy begins, we are on a fictional college campus…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":672851,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[263],"tags":[192741,18,117,19,17,142975,327,84623,284440,271363,11492,282562],"class_list":["post-672850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-bill-pullman","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-jack-huston","tag-movies","tag-paul-schrader","tag-sofia-boutella","tag-venice-2026","tag-venice-film-festival","tag-venice-film-festival-2026"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117214760634743031","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=672850"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672850\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/672851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=672850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=672850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=672850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}