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.
Faith
The Bottom Line
Just fine until a silly swerve.
