The plot proper begins when Tell sneaks into a private arms and security convention hosted by his ex-superior from Abu Ghraib, John Gordo (Willem Dafoe) and on his way out is stopped by a young man named Cirk (Tye Sheridan), the son of one of Tell’s fellow torturers in Iraq—who, Cirk reveals, has since killed himself as the bitter end of a cycle of violence and drug abuse that began in Abu Ghraib. Cirk wants Tell to help him kidnap, torture, and execute John Gordo as an act of vigilante justice. Because, as Cirk points out, there has been no justice; when the abuses at Abu Ghraib became widely known, low-ranking participants like Cirk’s father and Tell himself were convicted for their crimes, while Gordo and most of the high-ranking architects of Abu Ghraib’s abuses ducked any publicity or punishment, honorably retiring to become well-compensated private-sector consultants. William Tell refuses Cirk, but it’s clear that Cirk’s quest has resonated with him. The house won, and he now bears the moral debt. And as Calvinists know, moral debt beckons a violent reckoning—the death of one to redeem another.

What makes The Card Counter stand out from Schrader’s previous films is scale. Many of his most famous movies are concerned with the salvation of one individual, most notably his Taxi Driver screenplay, in which the protagonist massacres the owners of a brothel in order to save a single underage sex worker. The Card Counter isn’t completely devoid of such questions of individual salvation; part of Tell’s interest in Cirk pivots on a quite literal desire to pay Cirk’s debts with his gambling winnings. But Tell and Cirk’s personal connections to one of the most nakedly cruel seasons of the American empire turns the question of their individual salvations into a question of atonement for the sins of their whole country.

The Card Counter complicates the individualism endemic in much of modern American Christianity’s ideas about salvation. The common Evangelical refrain of “Jesus died for your sins” operates under the assumption of hermetically sealed sin—the significance of a sin is its eternal effect on the soul of the person who commits it, and so Christ’s atonement is primarily spoken of in terms of the “washing clean” of that soul. But sin doesn’t come out of an individualized vacuum; it’s part of a whole web of injustices, power dynamics, and systemic factors. The Card Counter’s context of military violence is perhaps the most extreme example possible of this concept. The horrific abuse committed by U.S. personnel against prisoners at Abu Ghraib could not have been possible without the apparatus of an enormous nation-state bent around creating conditions that encourage such abuse. Moreover, the cleansing of individual perpetrators’ souls does nothing to redeem the catastrophic suffering caused by that nation-state. Perhaps Tell has turned his life around; perhaps his soul has been saved. But, as Tell sees so clearly and dispiritingly in the cushy post-military life of John Gordo, the engine of the American Empire grinds on. What is the Gospel when not simply individuals but entire nations are totally depraved?

The closest precedent to this question in Schrader’s filmography is his previous film, First Reformed, when an environmental activist asks what becomes the film’s backbone: “Can God forgive us for what we have done to this world?”—with emphasis on the collective atonement of us rather than the individual me or you. The Card Counter is both smaller-scale and knottier when it comes to the question of collective atonement: smaller for its focus on a single nation rather than the entire planet and knottier for the ways that closer focus allows for more troubling specifics.

Perhaps it’s because of the knottier complexities of The Card Counter’s subject that unfortunately Schrader seems as though he’s run out of things to say by the end. Unlike First Reformed, the ultimate violence here feels less like a tragic inevitability and more like an obligation to the theological and political framework that Schrader has set up. There’s something hollow about the descent into the same tropes about isolated men looking for violent spiritual release that Schrader has built up over the past forty-plus years of filmmaking when they are applied to something as specific and grotesque as Abu Ghraib.