I’m not sure what to think about director Paul Andrew Williams‘ “Faith,” a strange, heavy little film that doesn’t quite know what it wants to be. It begins as a grounded drama about a working-class single mother Gina (Erin Doherty) and her wonderful young son (Smylie Bradwell) along with a mysterious stranger (James McAvoy) who is kind, unsettling, and just a little bit off. There’s a quiet sadness hanging over the story from the start, especially as the stranger seems to know more about death and suffering than he should.
Then tragedy hits, and the film becomes genuinely difficult to sit with. Grief is messy here, and the movie doesn’t shy away from making you feel the weight of it. There’s a real sense of pain and dread, but also an underlying story about faith, forgiveness, redemption, and finding the courage to keep going when life has given you very little reason to.
The problem is that Williams writes himself into a corner, and his story eventually takes a hard turn away from the intimate domestic drama it initially establishes. It begins as a moving story about ordinary people dealing with extraordinary circumstances, but then heads off in the totally bonkers direction of a supernatural tale filled with bloody imagery, Christian symbolism, and some increasingly wild theological ideas. The shift is jarring. By the end, the film feels like an entirely different movie (and not necessarily a better one).
I did find something compelling in its ambition, though. The writing is strongest when Williams stays close to his characters and their grief, particularly in the way the stranger’s own suffering starts to emerge. The blend of drama, horror, romance, and supernatural elements keeps you guessing, even if the movie eventually pushes that unpredictability a little too far.
The final stretch is rushed and leaves too many questions hanging, with some of the film’s bigger ideas feeling more asserted than developed. A little more restraint (and a lot more explanation) could have made the supernatural elements land with much greater force. Here, they just feel weird. Too weird.
“Faith” definitely requires and open mind and a heck of a lot of patience to watch. It’s haunting, beautiful, bizarre, and definitely not easy to get through. And while it may go completely off the rails with its supernatural weirdness, at the heart of the film is a simple story about finding the strength to carry on when the universe throws the weight of the world at your doorstep.
By: Louisa Moore
