Master Gardener, review: Paul Schrader mines familiar territory in horticultural crime thriller

Attentive viewers may have noticed that in the films of Paul Schrader, characters looking to unwind after a hard day’s work don’t tend to throw themselves on the sofa, pop open the Pringles, and zone out in front of Selling Sunset. Instead, they take themselves off to featureless rooms, pour themselves a drink (whisky or water will do), and write down solemn reflections on their chosen career path by the light of a single desk lamp. Master Gardener, which premiered on Saturday at Venice, opens with this now extremely familiar sight: a black-clad male in an anonymous motel, scratching away in his notepad.

There was a lot of this sort of thing in Schrader’s two most recent features, First Reformed and The Card Counter, and even more of it here, which gives Master Gardener the air of, well, not unintentional self-parody, exactly, but an inessential return to an already well-mined seam. The latest iteration of the director’s instantly recognisable lonely man character type is Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton), who fastidiously tends the grounds of Gracewood estate under the appreciative eye of its owner Mrs Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver), whose nickname for this brooding galoot is “Sweet Pea”.

There’s an enjoyably prickly Lady Chatterley dynamic between this pair, stemming from her decision 10 years ago to give Narvel a job and thereby allow him to escape his chequered past, grisly reminders of which remain etched on his skin in tattoo form. So when she asks him to extend a similar kindness to her wayward great-niece – Maya (Quintessa Swindell), who’s currently couriering drugs around town for her late mother’s dealer – Narvel can only accept, even though a new personal connection to the local underworld threatens to reactivate some long-dormant seeds in his own troubled psyche.

Schrader can do this stuff in his sleep, and in Master Gardener you sometimes wonder if he might be. The central metaphor is sound – gardening requires the taming of nature, which is another way to say self-discipline – and Edgerton is a persuasive man of faith, sniffing handfuls of soil so deeply they leave a line along his upper lip, like chocolate milk. But the central existential dilemma doesn’t feel as soul-scouring here as it did in First Reformed or The Card Counter, and Swindell’s character ultimately doesn’t feel like much more than kindling for Narvel’s personal crisis.

Even so, Schrader-heads will surely enjoy this as a sort of victory lap after his last two triumphs, and it’s not without its moments: the romantic dialogue (“I want to take off my clothes so bad”/ “I would like nothing more”) is absurd but still genuinely erotic, and you haven’t lived until you’ve seen Edgerton menace two hoodlums with a pair of secateurs.

Playing at the Venice Film Festival. A UK release has yet to be announced