‘Faith’ Review: Erin Doherty and James McAvoy in Messy Grief Drama

Erin Doherty, best known for her turns in Netflix’s Adolescence and The Crown, tears up the screen with an intense but tightly controlled performance as a woman tortured by grief after the unthinkable happens in British writer-director Paul Andrew Williams’ latest, Faith.

Both Doherty and her co-star, James McAvoy, also in fine-to-fab fettle here, get a chance to use their own British accents for a change (a yeoman English one for Doherty, Glaswegian for McAvoy) to play working-class characters in a story that, unusually for a British film, isn’t about class at all. Instead, this turns out to be about more primal stuff like pain, love and redemption, which for 80 percent of the running time it explores with great sensitivity and credible naturalism. Then, not unlike Williams’ previous mixed-bag Dragonfly, it goes totally coo-coo for coco pops in the last act, this time with kooky Christian symbolism serving up a supernatural reveal that’s just daft.

The ending’s swerve into horror-adjacent territory won’t be completely unexpected for those who have been following Williams’ career. There were similar shenanigans in his revenge-and-violence-stuffed crime thriller Bull. But as with Dragonfly and its pairing of Andrea Riseborough and Brenda Blethyn, the magician’s weird prestige at the end eclipses the hard work just put in by the two excellent actors at the film’s center, who bounce off each other so beautifully and whose characters’ relationship develops in such an unexpected way.

Set on a generically unbecoming social housing development called the Starling Estate (the film was shot in Yorkshire in the north of England), the plot revolves around people with little wealth or education but strong family and community ties. Doherty’s Gina is a single mother who works on the assembly line at a local candy factory, a gig that offers her hours that fit in with caring for her nine-year-old son Jamie (Smylie Bradwell, recently seen in Hamnet).

One evening, Gina leaves Jamie with a teenage babysitter and goes to the local pub for a quiz night. At the bar, she meets Michael (McAvoy), a teetotal stranger who works at a food bank for the homeless. Michael helps Gina and her team with some of the answers to the trivia questions and later walks her home, where a stray comment to the babysitter hints that Michael either has mind-reading skills like McAvoy’s Xavier in the X-Men movies or omniscient power.

Michael and Gina’s relationship remains chaste over a few informal assignations that might be dates or just hangs, a lack of clarity that rather frustrates Gina. Without spelling too much out, the script makes it clear she’s had her fair share of lousy men in her life, and Michael’s near angelic self-restraint despite offers to get more intimate seem to just make him more attractive. But she’s clearly willing to take it slow as he seems to present a possible father figure for Jamie, a sweet kid whom Gina dotes on (although like any parent she can get a bit growly when, for example, he doesn’t go straight to sleep the night before his birthday). Before that, she and he had spent the evening hanging out and playing board games with Michael and enjoying a visit from Gina’s sister Pops (Liv Hill) and the latter’s daughter Lotty (Nuala Poulter), who’s just a little younger than Jamie.

That night, Williams’ script plants another ominous clue that Michael is not all he seems and in the morning, life has become hell on earth for Gina in a way that’s better not described on account of spoilers. What happens entirely changes the dynamic between Gina and Michael, who tries his best to comfort her although no words or hugs or kind gestures of any sort could ever heal this kind of pain.

Doherty infuses Gina’s despair with a very specific kind of fury, a rage against the universe that she turns inward, and tries to destroy herself with the help of booze, depression and a refusal to let anyone in to help, including her sister. The performance in another actor’s hands could easily have rung false, or felt too theatrical, but Doherty calibrates it all very carefully, and her natural command of technique carries the film through the second half’s very dark slough of despondency. McAvoy has less to do apart from looking worried for his friend’s mental health and then, in the last furlough, to put across the final reveal without cracking up.

He and Doherty get through it in the end, but the result is messy and will leave viewers with a lot of WTF queries as the credits roll, and a bit of an icky feeling that a shower after might not fix. Clearly, the title is a hint that we just have to roll with it all, but the theology here is decidedly sketchy.

At least DP Simona Susnea’s jewel-like lighting set-ups and the gently eerie score by mononymic composer Raffertie and Sian O’Gorman bring a little rapture to the proceedings that distract from the unholy nonsense of the conclusion.