If Light Sleeper encapsulates Paul Schrader’s personal and artistic philosophy up to this point in his career, his next two endeavors cannot be so easily understood except in the sense of Schrader as a filmmaker of ever-evolving dimensions and ambitions. Schrader does not have an emotional attachment to cinema — he saw his first film at age 17 — so it makes sense to attribute some of his unusual artistic decisions to his desire to understand and pave a new avenue for film within both the studio system and independent circuit. Very little of Witch Hunt, a 1994 movie produced for HBO Films, is relevant to the overarching themes of Schrader’s prior works. What, then, would attract him to this strange story in which magic is presented as a practical tool utilized by society, a tool understood to be both unbelievably useful and highly addictive, with a potentail for danger? The ony sensible answer seems to be that it was so different from the types of stories he is typically drawnn to that Witch Hunt presented a unique challenge to Schrader’s understanding of filmmaking, especially given its smaller audience and tighther budget. Despite the small budget, Schrader was granted more freedom, and could attempt to tell a kind of story he was not familiar with. The film gave Schrader the opportunity to stretch himself as a director, and he was able to experiment with limited special effects and bizarre situations in which magic and realism collide.

In his next film, Touch, an adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel, we see one of the more unusual collaborations in modern American cinema. Leonard, most associated with hard-boiled, noir-esque crime plots and idiosyncratic dialogue, is not the first author you would expect Paul Schrader to turn to for source material. Yet, perhaps because this is Schrader’s first explicit attempt to adapt a novel to the screen, he chose a style and sensibility similar to his own in the broadest sense. That broadest sense is the overarching theme of religion; Schrader was raised in a strict Dutch Calvinism home, and while Touch revolves around Catholicism, it seems the two sects of Christianity are not that different with regards to their austerity and strong reliance on personal accountability to God. Therefore, the central character in Touch, a former monk named Juvenal who volunteers at an outreach center and appears to have supernatural healing abilities, must have appealed to Schrader as a man who takes his religion very seriously, but not to the degree that it prevents him from experiencing life. Essentially, Schrader is looking at religious piety from the moderate perspective his film career has elicited, which also explains why, really for the first time, he felt comfortable enough to include a broader comic tone as well.

We may characterize this moment in Paul Schrader’s career as experimental — the mixture of tones and source material are decidely different — but it is worth asking whether or not the experiment succeeds. The HBO television movie Witch Hunt seems like nothing more than an excuse to conjur up 1950s noir styles and settings and cross them with a modern understanding of the occult and its supposed powers. A number of well-known actors come together to play dress-up in the type of movie that cannot seem to shake its imitative quality, which is essentially all it has going for it. Touch, on the other hand, feels like an attempted redemption for Witch Hunt, but also an opportunity to inject some human feeling and joyful expression not typical of Schrader’s work. The film is bright compared to Schrader’s prior works, and the element of danger that lurks underneath most Schrader films doesn’t haunt viewers as they watch the story unfold. Because Touch is less personal than his other stories, Schrader is able to play around with the different qualities of the characters, who all behave more broadly than what is expected. Indeed, a few scenes highlight the quality of Leonard’s work and his penchant for off-beat, eclectic situations and interactions. While these few scenes are well-done and highlight a strong adaption, the rest of the film chugs along in a predictable manner but not without the eccentricities of its author and director implanted throughout. Is it worth seeing? Certainly, if you have a penchant for lapsed religiosity and romance.