In April 2025, director Paul Schrader was accused of sexual assault and harassment by a former assistant. By June, he began production on “The Basics of Philosophy,” a mournful admission that feels tethered to these developments, directly or otherwise. The script was written before the allegations were made public, but its tale of an accused college professor in search of absolution feels especially personal (not to mention, especially uncomfortable) in this light. The result is a film whose text and subtext are undoubtedly riveting, but whose meta-text — the story of its creation, and the fact that it exists at all — is worthy of some inquiry.
Unfolding in his de-facto mode of epistolary confessional, the movie follows philosophy professor John Jorrinson (Jack Huston), yet another of Schrader’s burdened men-in-rooms, scribbling (or in this case, typing) inner thoughts we hear in voiceover. Replacing the diaries in “First Reformed,” “The Card Counter” and “Master Gardener” (and even the documentary camera of “Oh, Canada”) is a more oblique but equally exacting method of self-reflection: a biography of philosopher Baruch Spinoza, which offers Jorrinson the chance to pose broad questions about his place in the world, and whether true change is possible.
He asks these same questions of his students at a small liberal arts college, scenes which repeat themselves throughout the 94-minute runtime, but seldom yield new dramatic layers. However, the film’s initial point of intrigue is his stilted relationship with his equally attractive peer, psychology professor Rebecca Richards (Sofia Boutella), a single mother to a teenage boy. She wants them to get more serious, but an invisible wall keeps Jorrinson at bay — which he blames on being preoccupied with his dying father. At the funeral, a mysterious man in a turquoise tie (Daniel Zovatto) shows up to pay his respects, who Jorrinson half-recognizes, and whose piercing gaze sends him down a rabbit hole of remorseful recollections.
In broad strokes: Jorrinson once did something monstrous, which his late father helped cover up while taking care of his teenage victim’s future. In the modern climate, to tell this story from the perspective of a perpetrator is to draw understandable ire, though this expectation is baked into the movie’s telling. Its tale of severe transgression seeks not to garner empathy for Jorrinson (no matter how the resurgent past threatens his relationship, or his profession). Rather, “The Basics of Philosophy” poses piercing questions of absolution and atonement, which Schrader unspools gradually and meticulously. When viewed solely in this isolated context, it makes for a robust morality play, whose most subdued moments feel explosive, and whose sexual explorations (subsequent to its lurid twists and turns) gesture toward thorny psychological dimensions.
However, to separate the art from its artist in this case would be to miss the forest for the trees (not the least because of how publicly Shrader has questioned his own sexuality). Whether the film is a direct confrontation of its author’s feelings, its existence as art is inseparable from its function within commerce, as a product that was not only bankrolled despite his public accusations, but which placed Schrader in a position of power during its making. As a film with sincere, even thoughtful questions about the nature of justice and healing — and what these things even mean in the context of assault — its admirable on-screen story fits jaggedly with the reality of its creation, a dichotomy that’s just as worth wading through as its dilemmatic character arc.
Huston delivers a tremendously haunted performance, as a man who knows exactly what he’s done, and who believes that even his base desire to be forgiven may be a bridge too far. But even as Jorrinson interrogates his own right to live — let alone live happily with Rebecca — and the story broaches the gut-wrenching question of what’s to stop him from repeating his infraction, this self-reflexive tale of metamorphosis can’t help but turn the camera too explicitly on itself. It pulls back the curtain just a little too far for most viewers’ comfort. That is, so long as they’re aware of who Schrader is, and the things he’s done as far back as when writing Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” — an admission that bears even more relevance to the story at hand.
In tandem with the film’s own narrative, about what Jorrinson is owed and what he deserves, the very act of watching and digesting “The Basics of Philosophy” becomes its own vital conversation. What do we do in the rare instance when art — worse yet, good art, and effective art — comes from a place of genuine remorse, for things we rightly label heinous? It is, in that sense, a deeply challenging work, but only inasmuch as someone might be willing (or able) to give it the time of day.
Based on how its plot unfolds, Schrader seems to know he isn’t even owed that much.
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