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A dying filmmaker interviewed for a documentary about his work takes the chance to confess his crimes to his wife and destroy the myth cinephiles built around it.

The structure of Paul Schrader’s latest film, Oh, Canada, is centred around this documentary. Leonard Fife (Richard Gere and, in his younger self, Jacob Elordi) starts telling the story of his life to a confused documentarian, his ex-student Malcolm (Michael Imperioli), and Fife’s wife Emma (Uma Thurman), who’s already halfway through her grieving stage.

Fife is described as a pioneer of the genre and a brave humanitarian who invented a style of interviewing specific to disarm its subjects (like the one Errol Morris invited in real life) but is most known for the bravery of defecting to Canada to escape the War in Vietnam, and later travelling to Cuba.

The reality unravels slowly and unreliably. Fife tells his story in disconnected patches and unreliable recollections. He admits to talking to Emma but, simultaneously, is talking to the entire world and, in a way, to himself. He reveals his defection may not have been so morally exact and that Cuba may not have happened. Slowly, he demythologises his persona on record in front of the camera, while also addressing more personal and painful issues about his relationship with his two wives, his estranged son, and his friends.

What is interesting about Schrader’s approach is how he treats his memory as secondary to the dramatic problem that envelops it. It doesn’t matter the level of truth in what he’s saying – it’s disjointed and selective. Schrader shoots some scenes in black-and-white, others in colour, and others with this grainy film stock like an Altman or an Elaine May movie. Thurman and Penelope Mitchell play two roles, and often, someone interjects with “another point of view”. None of that matters – what is vital for Schrader, who is turning 79 this year, is the weight of regret of a person facing death.

Remember Jason Robard’s monologue in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia? An old man dying of cancer, high on a cocktail of drugs, goes on an almost 10-minute monologue about the pain of regret? Oh, Canada is the 90-minute version of that. It makes sense that Schrader here adapts Russell Banks’ novel Foregone and that Paul Thomas Anderson tried to adapt another Banks novel shortly after Magnolia. This is all connected.

What filmgoers can find uninviting here is the permeating and confusing sadness of the piece. There is silence for the most part, only broken by these lo-fi musical interjections by singer-songwriter Matthew Houck (also known as Phosphorescent). Schrader revealed he had chosen Houck for his anti-anthemic style, and the result is evident – the few tracks that grace the film are celebratory. The music heightens Oh, Canada’s melancholic mood and its sense of auto-destructiveness. What is left for the man who has lived everything to do but to admit it was all a lie? And like all lies, it’s not glamorous or comforting. I hate that patronising idea from The Life of Pi that soothing lies are more important than the truth. Children think like that. Adults face their consequences.

This is the first project for Schrader after signing his lauded trilogy about toxic masculinity (First Reformed, The Card Counter, and Master Gardener) and if feels every bit as refreshing as those films. Artistically Schrader continues to be the most prolific he’s ever been, but here he addresses death for the first time. Not as a frightening concept but as the opportunity of revising his own self in the eyes of the world. The last message of an artist to be “don’t believe anything I said” is a brutal one. Can’t be more self-reflective than that. On top of it all he sees the pursuit of art to be intrusive and almost amoral. Without spoiling much, there’s a moment at the end that, in the grand scheme of things, defies our sense of what is right and what is not. Schrader’s points the finger to the mirror but to all his colleagues as well.

Shortly after the release of Oh, Canada, Schrader, who is relatively active on social media, made a post lauding the possibilities of ChatGPT. He had asked the AI tool to write a new script in the style of Paul Schrader and was impressed by how close to reality it was. And yet, Oh, Canada could not have been made by a Paul Schrader except this one – an aging, cranky man who revels in the sorrows that haunt him. The Schrader who wrote Taxi Driver and American Gigolo would not have made Oh, Canada. Because an artist is the sum of their parts, and that’s inherently personal to the time and space he inhabits. And the truth is incidental – it doesn’t matter how unreliable the recollection is; what it’s trying to say is always more important.

Verdict: 4 out of 5
For melancholic bleak people who are concerned about what will go through their minds when they face the final curtain.