Philosophy goes to Venice: Schrader's new film premieres on 4 September

What makes a film festival into a philosophy story is not the title of the film. It is the director.

Paul Schrader's new film, The Basics of Philosophy, has its world premiere out of competition at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival on 4 September 2026.

The cast includes Jack Huston, Sofia Boutella, Daniel Zovatto, Bill Pullman and Dana Delany. Martin Scorsese is among the producers.

Why Schrader belongs on a philosophy page#

Schrader's name is known as that of the screenwriter of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. His intellectual biography, though, begins somewhere else.

He grew up in a strict Calvinist household and was not allowed to go to the cinema until he was seventeen. He read theology at Calvin College, then studied film at UCLA.

His first book, Transcendental Style in Film (1972), is a study of Ozu, Bresson and Dreyer. Its thesis was that certain directors develop a formal language not in order to depict the transcendent but in order to make what cannot be shown felt — the static camera, the empty frame, the refusal of emotion.

The book is still read in film theory. It also explains Schrader's own filmography.

"The man in the room"#

Schrader's recent films follow a pattern that critics have christened the "man in a room" sequence: First Reformed (2017), The Card Counter (2021), Master Gardener (2022).

The structure of all three is the same. A solitary man sits in a room and keeps a journal. In his past there is a crime, or complicity in one. Towards the end of the film he is offered the possibility of atonement.

This is an open rewriting of Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest. But each time Schrader puts a different contemporary matter at the centre: in First Reformed, the climate crisis and the collapse of religious belief; in The Card Counter, Abu Ghraib and responsibility for torture.

Whether the new film joins the sequence is not yet clear.

What to expect#

The title — The Basics of Philosophy — may well be ironic; Schrader's films are usually concerned not with finding a foundation but with the giving way of one.

The argument over Nolan's adaptation of the Odyssey that we reported this week raised a question: how does cinema set up an ethical problem? The charge against Nolan was that he had made the problem easier by fitting his hero with a modern conscience.

Schrader's entire filmography works in the opposite direction: the hero suffers the pangs of conscience, and it does not save him.

That the two films arrive in the same autumn looks likely to feed the argument about cinema and ethics.

The festival calendar#

The 83rd Venice Film Festival takes place on the Lido during September. The film screens in Venice Open, the out-of-competition strand.

A Turkish release date has not yet been announced.