Hardcore

A conservative Midwestern patriarch has his world shaken when he must search for his missing daughter in the seedy underworld of the California sex industry in this bleak psychological neo-noir from Paul Schrader. Paul Schrader's second directorial work following Blue Collar (1978), this psychological neo-noir sees a devout Calvinist businessman, played by George C. Scott, leave his Midwestern town to find his teenage daughter, who has vanished on a church-sponsored trip to California. His worldview is upended when the search becomes a nightmare odyssey through the sleazy underbelly of California, as the realisation that his daughter's whereabouts are worse than he could imagine. Often framed as a 70s retelling of John Ford's The Searchers (1956), Hardcore paints a bleak portrait of the American Dream and its fragile promise of moral certainty. A personal work for Schrader, who was brought up Calvinist, the film explores a number of themes - faith (and crisis of), alienation, repression and the possibility of redemption - that were introduced in his writing of Taxi Driver (1976) and would later become his directorial signature.