Paul Schrader was inspired to make Oh, Canada after a succession of COVID-related hospital stints. Those close calls made him realize, as he told the Associated Press earlier this year, that “if I’m going to make a film about death, I’d better hurry up.” That is not to say Schrader’s movies have thus far gone unvisited by the Grim Reaper: most of his protagonists can be expected to eventually meet physical and/or soulful demises. But it is that none has introduced a dying lead character looking so directly down the barrel of their mortality from the outset — a late-in-life change of pace befitting a filmmaker in fragile health who turned 78 just a few months ago.

Schrader’s movies have largely centered around men who live lives thick with turmoil, sometimes created by the darkness of their pasts and sometimes by difficult present–day circumstances — things that are not always mutually exclusive. In either case, a breakdown is inevitable. For Oh, Canada, we wait for the internal tumult to be silenced by time. Much-laureled Canadian documentarian Leonard (Richard Gere, reuniting with Schrader for the first time since 1980’s American Gigolo) is likely going to die from cancer in only a few days, so he’s agreed to let an Oscar-winning documentary crew (led by a Canadian-accented Michael Imperioli) comprising some former students make a movie about his life and career. They have 25 questions for him to answer over the course of a marathonic day shoot in a creaky country house. 

Read the full column at South Sound.