Master Gardener (2023)
Director: Paul Schrader Run Time: 111 min. Rating: R Release Year: 2023
Starring: Eduardo Losan, Esai Morales, Joel Edgerton, Quintessa Swindell, Sigourney Weaver
Country: United States
Language: English
About the film:
World Premiere at the 2022 Venice Film Festival.
Master filmmaker and Academy Award nominee Paul Schrader teams up with award-winning actor Joel Edgerton and 3 time Academy Award nominee Sigourney Weaver, rising star Quintessa Swindell, and Esai Morales in this thrilling story of redemption and revenge.
Narvel Roth is the meticulous horticulturist of Gracewood Gardens. He is as much devoted to tending the grounds of this beautiful and historic estate, to pandering to his employer, the wealthy dowager Mrs. Norma Haverhill. When Mrs. Haverhill demands that he take on her wayward and troubled great-niece Maya as a new apprentice, chaos enters Narvel’s spartan existence, unlocking dark secrets from a buried violent past that threatens them all.
“Schrader’s commitment to moral ambiguity makes his work thrillingly divisive and near impossible to not have some form of a reaction to.”
—Leila Latif, IndieWire
About the filmmaker:
Paul Schrader is a film critic and acclaimed writer-director with a knack for telling stories of self-destruction and redemption. His films have screened at festivals around the world, including Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Sundance, and Toronto. His features include American Gigolo (1980), Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), Light Sleeper (1992), Affliction (1997), The Walker (2007), the Academy Award-nominated dramatic thriller First Reformed (2017), and The Card Counter (2021). He also penned the screenplays for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), and Bringing Out the Dead (1999). Schrader earned his B.A. from Calvin College and his M.A. from UCLA while working as a film critic and writing “Transcendental Style in Film”. He also attended the inaugural class at the American Film Institute.
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