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\n\tMost British directors track past the postwar redbrick council homes where the majority of lower working-class people live their relatively ordinary lives, untouched by crime, drugs and all the other clich\u00e9s of life on the bottom rungs of the social ladder. These directors use such shots as shorthand, but Paul Andrew Williams \u2014 still something of an outlier in his native industry, and yet still emphatically putting both the British and the independent into British independent cinema \u2014 is a rare exception, willing to take us in through the front doors of these deceptively nondescript houses and into the private spaces of people whose stories are never normally seen and who seldom, if ever, feel seen.<\/p>\n
\n\tFollowing very much in the slipstream of last year\u2019s Dragonfly<\/a>, the powerhouse pairing of Andrea Riseborough and Brenda Blethyn in the story of two lonely neighbors brought together by a shared need for company, Faith is another odd-couple story, this time with a slow-burn supernatural twist. Williams completists will recognize it as a companion piece to Bull (2021), a rare all-out genre piece from the director. But where Bull was a story of guilt, revenge and redemption, Faith is full of grace, a story about the burden of goodness that recalls Scorsese\u2019s underrated Bringing Out the Dead (1999), the soulful flipside to 1976\u2019s Taxi Driver (for context, it\u2019s now 20 years since Williams\u2019 neo-noir debut London to Brighton, a much darker piece of work despite its apparently resolved ending).<\/p>\n \n\tFaith is primarily a vehicle for British actress Erin Doherty<\/a>, recently seen playing Princess Anne on The Crown. There are no airs and graces here, though; the character she plays is Gina, who works in a sweet factory in the environs of Leeds. Gina lives in a council rental with her son young Jamie (Smylie Bradwell), and, as is the case with all his films, Williams\u2019 set dressing tells us a lot about the woman that lives there: Gina is a provider; the house is neat and she has made her home there, in the absence of a father for Jamie. She\u2019s also a fighter, as we find out when a local boy gives Jamie a punch in the face and Gina confronts his mother.<\/p>\n \n\tDuring a rare midweek night out at the pub, where Perry Benson (a Shane Meadows regular) hosts a trivia quiz, Gina encounters a stranger at the bar. Michael (James McAvoy<\/a>) is new to the area and flirts respectfully with her, slyly slipping her a couple of correct answers that prevent her useless team from crashing out entirely. She is intrigued by his quiet demeanor \u2014 \u201cWhere have you been?\u201d she asks; \u201cEverywhere,\u201d he replies \u2014 and she comes to the conclusion that he must be a teacher, albeit on the seemingly random but actually fairly reasonable basis that he looks like one and talks like one.<\/p>\n \n\tThe first sign that things are about to leave Ken Loach territory occurs after Michael has walked Gina home and waits outside to see her in. Somehow, he knows that Gina\u2019s babysitter has stolen a tenner from the kitchen drawer, and he freaks her out with a mini lecture about the thing \u201cyou did today.\u201d Who is he really? As the couple get closer, it becomes clear that Gina is misreading the signals, and that Michael is engaging in some kind of deception behind the soy-boy image of the green tea-swilling vegetarian who volunteers at a food bank, working for free (because \u201cI\u2019ve got everything I need\u201d), and never seems to eat.<\/p>\n \n\tThe first half of the film meticulously exploits our natural suspicion that Michael is not everything he seems to be, because, in the real world, people that seem good are usually too good to be true (Gina wonders aloud if he\u2019s actually doing community service for some unspecified crime). The film doubles down on this when Michael is shown to have psychic powers: After a cryptic pep talk from Michael \u2014 who says, \u201cDon\u2019t be scared, you\u2019re going to see amazing things\u201d \u2014 Jamie is found dead in his bed, having choked on a toffee. Why didn\u2019t Michael save him if he knew? Maybe he\u2019s a devil and didn\u2019t want to? Or perhaps he\u2019s an angel, a concept that comes with its own set of complications\u2026<\/p>\n \n\tThe answer to that question lies somewhere in between, and while the increasingly heavy religious overtones might be laid on a bit thick, Williams pulls short of outright sentimentality (the Achilles heel of his last TIFF<\/a> entry, 2015\u2019s Song For Marion). To McAvoy\u2019s credit, he leaves the lion\u2019s share of the work to Doherty, as the grieving mother tries to work past her suicidal thoughts, and past her guilty burden (the knowledge that she told Jamie to be quiet as he lay dying).<\/p>\n \n\tThere\u2019s an argument to be made that Faith doesn\u2019t need all the supernatural trimmings, and certainly that it could benefit from a little more ambiguity about what is real and what is not in Gina\u2019s tragic delirium. Nevertheless, it\u2019s an emotional chamber piece that punches well above its weight, especially when Doherty\u2019s heartbreaking performance reaches chilling new heights of what can only be described as \u201craw.\u201d The message is short but sweet \u2014 \u201cEvil doesn\u2019t love,\u201d says Michael \u2014 but it marks another modest win for Williams, the track-suited poet laureate of middle England\u2019s industrial decline.<\/p>\n