Faith

If Ken Loach did comic-book adaptions, they might look a little like Paul Andrew Williams’ bold vision of ordinary lives and supernatural intervention. The British director, working from his own (very) original screenplay, draws an arrestingly raw performance from Erin Doherty and a tantalisingly ambiguous one from James McAvoy. The ending is mawkish and felt misjudged, but Faith still got under my skin in ways I hadn’t anticipated. 

Williams likes to cross genre lines and here he tosses together kitchen sink realism, warm humanism, grief drama, and a twist that might just have spilled out of Keanu Reeves supernatural schlockfest Constantine. Those layers are slowly revealed in Faith’s unnamed British town (filmed in Wakefield, West Yorkshire), prior to a denouement that turns into a test of faith in the filmmaker’s vision.  

A world away from her porcelain Princess Anne in The Crown, the excellent Doherty’s single mum Gina is a broken vase that needs glueing back together. She struggles to support her bullied son Jamie (Hamnet’s Smylie Bradwell) and with the strains of making ends meet and dealing with hostile neighbours. McAvoy’s mysterious stranger Michael could be the man to help. She sees him standing at the bar at her local quiz night and he’s soon slipping her a few answers and buying her a drink. They end up walking home together and an easy connection forms.

The denouement turns into a test of faith in the filmmaker’s vision 

Gina is initially touched by his kindness and intrigued by his chivalrous refusal to stay over. They agree to meet again. But over time that sexual abstinence starts to feel like rejection, and his refusal to eat or drink anything apart from green tea begins to feel weird. Is he in recovery? Out on probation? Gina’s outspoken sis Pops (Liv Hill) thinks he may be a wrong’un. The last thing she needs is another one of those in her life with her young son’s dad off the scene. But there’s much more to Michael than meets the eye. McAvoy plays him with compassion cut with a slightly sinister edge. His interactions with Gina and Jamie are laden with deeper meaning. 

To say more would disarm a film that wants its secret at least half-veiled. It’s fairly obvious what the twist is, but there’s a curiosity in finding out how Williams will manoeuvre it into something emotionally and narratively satisfying. As with his last film, Dragonfly, the ending does prove to be a curveball. Here, it’s a more questionable one.

Faith premiered at the Toronto Film Festival. In UK and Ireland cinemas TBA.