If the title of this review is confusing, it’s by design. Oh, Canada is the latest film by perennially cantankerous and existentially tortured cult icon Paul Schrader. It’s a demanding film – what Schrader calls a ‘mosaic’ – shot in four distinct styles. These are variations; flourishes, which underscore the film’s interest in the unreliability of memory and, more broadly, the spirits of anguish that have defined Schrader’s fifty-year filmography. In this sense, Oh, Canada doubles as both a fictional and meta-fictional retrospective on the life of a filmmaker. On the screen, it is imaginary American Canadian documentarian Leonard Fife (played young by Jacob Elordi and older by Richard Gere), but in real life it may as well be Schrader himself.

Oh, Canada is adapted from the novel Foregone (2021) by Russell Banks. Like the book, it reinvents itself in each act. In the opening, the viewer learns that Leonard Fife is dying of cancer and has agreed to sit for one final interview before his death. The film even points to the conventionality of its structure, stating in voiceover that a dying protagonist must die at the end of the film. Fife, a documentary filmmaker, is an American-born Vietnam draft dodger who defected to Canada in the 1960s. He insists that his wife, Emma (Uma Thurman), be present for the duration of the interview, because he wants her to hear the truth about his life. This set-up leads one to believe that the interview taking place on screen will be one of reverence and respect, and that Oh, Canada itself will be a toothless, saccharine affair; elegiac and not much else. But as Fife begins to speak, it becomes evident that he is kind of just an asshole – to everyone. Instead of answering questions from the interviewers (Michael Imperioli and Victoria Hill), a married couple and former students of Fife’s, he chooses to turn the room into his confessional box. Facing his imminent death, he foists his dirty laundry – his misdeeds and wrongdoings – upon his peers and displaces the myths his legacy was founded upon.

Jacob Elordi as the young Leonard and Kristine Froseth as the young Emma (courtesy of Transmission Films)

The story of Fife’s life is told in flashbacks, which are chronologically distinguished by their differences in styles, colors, aspect ratios, and timelines. Fife, heavily medicated and unconcerned with his own legacy, begins unloading barbarous memories left and right. Infidelity, fake revolutionary politics, class traitorism, some more infidelity, and, in a truly wild scene, a bewildering lie in front of the draft board. He does this with no regard for his wife or the documentary being made about him. Instead of this being the lionising biopic of a revolutionary filmmaker, it becomes the penitence of a thanatophobic old bastard. Emma attempts to protect Leonard from this demythologisation by claiming that his memory is faulty, that he is confused by his life-ending medications. But is it? Certainly, probably, maybe, why not? The seeming unreliability of Leonard’s memory is reinforced by the film’s own lack of concern for its reality. Sometimes Leonard is the wrong age inside his own memories. Richard Gere watches his younger Elordi betraying friends and family; other times he is the right age. What’s reality? What’s fiction? Does it matter?!

Oh, Canada, in this regard, becomes an exercise. The subjectivity of the film’s time and memory allow Schrader to explore the Deleuzian idea that ‘cinema creates its own reality’. Each flashback teases this reality out to its expressionistic thresholds. The viewer understands that it is never necessarily the truth that is being depicted, and this element of unreliability seems crucial to any film that seeks to seriously interrogate its own construction. For anyone who has seen Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), this is familiar territory. By decoupling from the boundaries of narrative chronology and veracity, a film expresses itself with more spirituality; more honesty. It approaches something that, for Schrader, may be more true. Is this effective? It’s impossible to say. But I do personally find the un-archetypical nature of Fife’s character, his impertinence, extremely human.

This flavour of metamodern, self-actualising, reality-creating cinema is naturally a difficult, maybe-even-impossible, needle to thread. The conceit of Oh, Canada is founded on the viewer’s presumed familiarity with the history of cinema: the framing device of film-within-a-film, the unreliability of memory à la Resnais and Bresson, and even Schrader’s own book Transcendental Style in Film (1972) all feel prerequisite. Sure, it always helps to do some homework, but a truly great, or at least superior, work of art should stand on its own without all these things – and, given how much the film assumes, Oh, Canada doesn’t meet that scrutiny.

That said, the film earnestly juggles its timelines and styles. Credit is due for the editing (Benjamin Rodriguez Jr). A life, a timeline, is a massive puzzle. What’s to be included, excluded? When there is no Truth, how does one organise reality? Even in a mosaic, some things can still stick out. Not every piece may fall precisely into place. Some scenes are rushed, while others feel confusingly slow. At one point, the door to Fife’s bathroom closes. The camera lingers for seconds afterwards on the closed door. Time opens. The viewer is left to assume everything that takes place on the other side of the door. Therein lies the paradox of Oh, Canada: it is a beautifully puzzling film, but ultimately one that simultaneously assumes and witholds too much information.

Oh, Canada (Transmission Films) is released 27 March 2025.