Master Gardener
2022
***
Director: Paul Schrader
Cast: Joel Edgerton, Sigourney Weaver, Quintessa Swindell, Esai Morales, Eduardo Losan, Victoria Hill, Amy Le, Erika Ashley, Jared Bankens, Matt Mercurio, Rick Cosnett
Narvel Roth is a methodical gardener who has a shady past in a neo-Nazi group. His employer and occasional lover asks him take her orphaned mixed-race grandniece on as an apprentice. Paul Schrader's quiet and meditative drama forms an unofficial trilogy with First Reformed and The Card Counter, and in terms of quality, it lands somewhere between the two. This is an interesting and well-acted film (Sigourney Weaver gives a deliciously nasty performance as the rich widow), but Schrader treads very familiar ground, until his story and characters stop making any sense in the last third.
