The end of First Reformed, explained!

[Ed. - This post has (duh) spoilers for the movie. So if you haven't seen it, you might want to go explore some other corner of the Internet.]

Yeah, that headline was clickbait. I actually can explain the end of First Reformed. But to understand it, you're going to have to bear with me for a bit. Because there are quite a few theories floating around out there.

This most obvious is that what we've witnessed is a straight-up, Flannery O'Connor-style moment of grace. Toller shucks off the dark night of despair and surrenders to capital-H Hope symbolized by Mary and her unborn baby. The evidence for this interpretation is that this is literally what we watch happen with our own eyes. Anything beyond it is emotion and conjecture. And let's not forget, it mirrors the advice Toller gave to Michael at the beginning of the film. "Courage is the solution to despair, reason provides no answers."

Then again.

It could be the last sixty seconds are Toller's death dream before he gets sucked down to hell as punishment for self-selecting out of the gene pool. There's tons of evidence for this theory. Schrader himself said the climax was purposefully shot with different lighting and reduced ambient noise, which gives it a different texture than the rest of the film. And the abrupt cut in the middle of Toller and Mary's kiss sure does make it seem like it was all a dream that had to end because (in this interpretation) Toller'd just finished chugging a tumbler of drain cleaner.

Or it could be the entire movie is a metaphor. All the way through. No one is meant to be seen as a human being. The pastor is planet earth. The alcohol is pollution. His doctor is the scientists begging us to stop accelerating towards our own extinction. And Mary is the God we are all hurtling toward due to the apocalypse we seem to have consciously opted into.

And then there's a religious interpretation. Toller will step into the life that should have belonged to his dead son (who was named Joseph, in a move that's hit-you-on-the-head-with-a-hammer obvious) and raise a new messiah with Mary. This explains why Michael thinks the baby's a girl, but Mary tells Toller she's actually having a son. And that intimacy ritual? How is that anything other than a reenactment of immaculate conception?

Poke around on Reddit and you'll find a fifth theory. Mary was a classic noir villainess, a femme fatale who murdered her nervous-wreck hubby and seduced the substantially more godly and slightly more stable village pastor. The evidence for this is that Mary is creepy AF. She performs physical intimacy rituals with men she's neither physical nor intimate with. She claims she found and then re-hid Chekhov's Gun - errrr, Michael's suicide vest - before re-finding it later. And she's creepy AF because she's creepy AF. She levitates, man. I mean, when I saw Michael's body it crossed my mind, "Hey, maybe Mary blew his head off."

And that's the point. First Reformed is not like Mulholland Drive, where you leave the theater wondering what just happened, go to a coffeeshop, talk a bit and suddenly it all makes sense.

At the end of First Reformed an interpretation will suggest itself to you. And in it, you will reach a revelation about the way you see the world.

And then the other theories will come creeping in, spiders each spinning their own little webs. And through these webs you will explore your own capacity for imagination and empathy. And learn not just what you believe happened to Toller, but what you believe will happen to all of us when our day of reckoning finally comes.