112 min | R | September 10, 2021 | Focus Features
William Tell counts cards in casinos and lives in motel rooms he strips bare and rewraps in white sheets. He carries a past from a military prison and a young man who wants help settling a score. The math is the easy part.
William Tell drifts from one regional casino to the next, betting small, winning steady, never drawing attention. He learned to count cards in prison, where he served time for what he did at Abu Ghraib. Paul Schrader builds the film around a man doing penance through routine and self-denial. Tell keeps a journal and keeps his face flat. The card counting is a cover story for a film about a man who believes he deserves to suffer and has organized his entire life to make sure he does.
Oscar Isaac plays Tell with a stillness that holds the screen. He speaks in a low, even register that never rises, and the control reads as a cage he built himself. Tye Sheridan plays Cirk, a damaged young man with a plan for revenge against the officer who trained them both to torture. Willem Dafoe plays Major John Gordo as that officer, sleek and unpunished. Tiffany Haddish plays La Linda, who stakes Tell on the poker circuit and offers him a way back to feeling something. Haddish underplays against type and the warmth she brings exposes how thoroughly Tell has shut himself off.
Schrader writes and directs in the lineage of his own lonely-man scripts going back to Taxi Driver. The Abu Ghraib flashbacks use a distorted fisheye lens that warps the corridors into a fever, and the effect makes the prison feel like a place that bends reality. Cinematographer Alexander Dynan shoots the casinos in flat fluorescent light that drains every room of glamour. The motel ritual, Tell wrapping furniture and lamps in white cloth and twine, becomes the film’s central image of a man trying to control a world he cannot. The score by Robert Levon Been keeps a low electronic hum under the calm.
The film commits fully to its austerity and that commitment is both its strength and its limit. Tell’s discipline is fascinating to watch and the revenge plot that pulls him out of it never matches the power of the character study. Schrader is more interested in the cost of guilt than in the mechanics of payback, and the thriller elements feel like scaffolding around the real subject. This is a cold and serious film about whether a man who did monstrous things can ever balance the ledger. It does not pretend the answer is yes.