He's at least as good a director as Tarantino, although you'd never guess it from the grosses. His films heaad straight for the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes, and he is widely appreciated for his if not homage, than echo of the French maitre de Realism at 24 frames per second, Jean-Luc Godard. I was at the first screening of The Unbelievable Truth and recall several executives of independent companies moaning about how beautiful it was but it was too small and subtle for the marketplace. Hartley's realism is so finely tuned that he usually avoids using stars, though Isabelle Huppert did a loopy turn in his Amateur, and Hartley has carved a career path for Martin Donovan. A star in a small film is like the 600-pound gorilla sidling up to the bar.
Some independent films boast so many big-name simians that they start to look like zoos.
Avoiding affect, Schrader's direction emphasizes the psychological and economic depression of a New Hampshire town. The story is about getting to the bottom of a murder, but the real subject is the dreary circumstances and brutal emotions of ordinary people. Affliction is a carefully crafted story with emotional confrontations, potentially an apogee of Realism at its best. In a word, stars. The only one who doesn't come on trailing stardust is Mary Beth Hurt, Schrader's wife.