Paul Thomas Anderson's 65mm-shot post-war drama. Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman in a Scientology-adjacent power study the Academy declined to nominate for Best Picture.
Post-WWII America, late 1940s. Freddie Quell is a U.S. Navy veteran whose alcoholism, sexual obsession, and inability to maintain employment have left him drifting across the country. He stows away on a yacht in San Francisco and discovers it belongs to Lancaster Dodd, the leader of a quasi-religious philosophical movement called The Cause. Dodd takes Freddie in as a kind of pet project — a man Dodd believes The Cause's techniques can transform.
The film tracks Freddie and Dodd across roughly a year. The Cause's processing sessions, group rituals, and gradual organisational growth are depicted in detail. The relationship between Freddie and Dodd is the film's structural centre — neither friendship nor master-disciple in any conventional sense, but something more difficult. The film closes with Freddie having drifted away from The Cause, having one last brief sexual encounter, and lying in a beach setting that mirrors the film's opening — suggesting he has, in some sense, returned to where he began.
The Master is one of the few contemporary American films shot on 65mm. Cinematographer Mihai Mălaimare Jr. (a one-film replacement for Anderson's usual Robert Elswit) captured the post-war American landscape and the elaborate Cause interiors at a visual scale that almost no contemporary American film has matched. The film was projected in 70mm in select theatres on initial release.
The format choice is, in retrospect, a structural argument about the material. Anderson's argument was that a film about post-war American spiritual restlessness deserved the visual gravity that 65mm could provide. The format gives the film's quiet moments — the conversations between Freddie and Dodd, the rural Pennsylvania exteriors, the rooming-house interiors — a textural depth that conventional 35mm cannot quite match. The choice has been imitated; Oppenheimer (2023) and the recent IMAX-revival work is downstream of The Master's case for large-format film.
The Master is openly inspired by L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. Lancaster Dodd's biographical details — naval officer, novelist, founder of a quasi-philosophical movement that promises personal transformation through specific psychological techniques — track Hubbard closely enough that the comparison is unavoidable. Anderson never confirmed or denied the parallel during the film's release.
What the film does with the material is not, structurally, attack Scientology or expose it. The Cause is depicted as a genuine intellectual-emotional system whose techniques produce real effects on participants. Dodd is shown to be both a charlatan and a genuinely committed believer in his own ideas — a complexity most exposé-style cult films do not attempt. The film's argument is interested in the cult relationship as a kind of structural human pattern (the need for both Dodd and Freddie to have the other) rather than in the cult as social-criticism object.
The film is, in some sense, a two-hander between Philip Seymour Hoffman's Dodd and Joaquin Phoenix's Freddie. Both performances were nominated for Oscars (Phoenix for Best Actor, Hoffman for Best Supporting Actor); neither won. Amy Adams's supporting performance as Dodd's wife was also nominated. The three-nomination acting cluster is unusual for any film and was, in 2013, the most-discussed lead-performance combination of the year.
What makes the two-handed structure work is the specific physical contrast between the two actors. Phoenix plays Freddie with extreme physical control — the hunched posture, the side-mouth speech, the constant minor twitches. Hoffman plays Dodd with contained warmth and the deliberate verbal-charisma of a man who has practised persuasion across decades. The two registers are, in scene-by-scene confrontation, structurally productive of each other. Almost every Master scene between the two leads is, in some sense, an extended demonstration of how Anderson constructs two performances that the audience cannot stop comparing.