What do we mean by “style” when we talk about the films of Paul Schrader, and in what ways has a focus on style availed or thwarted our understanding of them? A supremely influential interpreter of style in film noir and the works of Yasujirō Ozu, Robert Bresson, and Carl Theodor Dreyer, Schrader has nevertheless put together a filmography that evades the stylistic salience or coherence customarily ascribed to other notable filmmakers of his generation, especially those directors with whom he has notably collaborated as a screenwriter. If we take style to be a filmmaker's “systematic and significant use of techniques of the medium,” then Schrader's directorial efforts often seem too labile and disparate to engage with a favored set of techniques on enough of a recurring basis to invest any patterns or changes in his use of them with much significance. For instance, there is no obsessive use of split-focus diopters and split screens, as in the films of Brian De Palma; no editing rhythms dependably in sync with the soundtrack's (often diegetic) pop music from the 1960s and 1970s, as in those of Martin Scorsese. At most, one could say there is a notable reliance on the use of freeze frames at the end of many of his films up until the late 1980s—Blue Collar (1978), American Gigolo (1980), Cat People (1982), and Light of Day (1987)—but Schrader has tended to avoid this as a stop button in his work since then. Alternatively, if we characterize style “by its stylistic elements, by its stylistic systems [that is, by narrative logic, cinematic time, and cinematic space], and, most abstractly, by the relations it sets up among those systems,” then there simply is not enough consistency at any of these levels from film-to-film to make such a threefold analysis of style all that useful. How far, for instance, would an inventory of such elements in The Canyons (2013), Dog Eat Dog (2016), and First Reformed (2017) take us when they are in the service of incongruent narrative logics and inconsistent conceptions of cinematic space and time that, when comparatively assessed across these three particular films, appear to be pursued without regard for each other at all?