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One of the main thrusts of Eugène Enriquez’s thought, at least as developed in his masterpiece De la horde à l’État (Enriquez, 1983), lies in bringing to light the psychosocial wellspring of drives that he calls — in reference to Freud — “the horde.” This essay bridges together Eugène Enriquez’s anthropology of civilization and Paul Schrader’s cinema of drives. While the American director’s last three films (First Reformed (2017), The Card Counter (2021) and Master Gardener (2023) serve as kind of seismograph or “analyzer” of contemporary Western social pathologies, above all his cinema invites the viewer to embark on a genuine exercise of contemplation, embodying in a sensitive form this “ethics of finitude” called for by Enriquez, and in no way neglecting the drives lying at the very cores of culture and civilization.