Preview: The Master

Film preview for The Whistleblower.

The Master sees Paul Thomas Anderson return with his latest film since 2007’s hugely successful There Will Be Blood, a film which cemented Anderson for many as the filmmaker of his generation. With praise already rushing in from early press and festival screenings, this auteur looks to be on course for even more Academy Award nominations with his story of cults, transition and unsettlement in post-war America.  

Anderson’s sixth feature film follows Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a Navy officer sent home from combat in the Second World War on the grounds of psychological instability. Struggling with settling back into a life chasing the great American dream and developing a serious addiction to his home-made hooch, Quell becomes a drifter looking for something certain in the mysterious modernity of America. All is looking lost for Quell until he finds himself, in a drunken stupor, on the steamboat of Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a self-titled ‘writer, doctor, nuclear physicist, theoretical philosopher [and]… above all, a man’. In this meeting of chance, Freddie finds cause and purpose, and Dodd finds a volunteer to exercise his psychological theories. Although Anderson denies the film is directly about Scientology, there is a clear connection between Dodd, the leader of a philosophical movement known as ‘The Cause’, and Scientology’s founder L. Ron Hubbard.  

With Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood providing an original score and cinematography being handled by Mihai Malaimare Jr., who has worked with the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, The Master is going to be an unmissable film. Especially for anyone who wants an alternative to Hollywood’s latest offerings from a filmmaker who has a complete understanding of his trade.