Oh dear.
I went into Faith blind, and I suggest you do too. It’s just my luck that this common practice of mine greatly enhanced my experience.
I guess you could call this experience…
Blind FAITH.
I know, I know… I’ll see myself out. And as I did, see myself out, of the theater, I made sure to tell James McAvoy and writer/director Paul Andrew Williams to their faces what a great thing they’ve done (Erin Doherty gives a humbling stupendous turn here too but I didn’t see her in the dark to tell her that as well).
When Paul Andrew Williams tells us in the introduction that he only penned the script just over a year ago, and it was only shot in January and February… my first thought was, well that’s okay it’s nice to support little indies and established celebrity side projects. If I had done even a smidge of research on Williams beforehand, I might have been biased by his past filmography which is mostly straight-to-streaming (formerly known as straight-to-DVD) horror flicks and Lifetime-adjacent dramas, but to avoid FOMO with my rush pass this year I’m not looking up anything, thereby suppressing any preconceptions while managing my expectations.
But fear not if you’re a more discriminant viewer, because I think that Williams has taken his diverse experience with backrooms horrors, campy thrillers and movie-of-the-week cheesy romance and blended it all together to make an interesting and intimate film of life-affirming substance, and to be honest, it nourished my soul.
The beauty and best asset of this film – from start to finish – is that you can’t pinpoint the genre at any point, and you don’t know how it’s going to unfold. The simple summary on Letterboxd or IMDB makes it sound like any other garden variety straight-to-streamer romance. Only a Wikipedia blurb clues you in to the supernatural slant.
I’m transfixed for the first hour watching masterclass actors McAvoy and Doherty simply talking and yet saying so much. From the sapiosexual meet-cute at the neighborhood pub trivia night to platonic family board games played out in the living room, I kept thinking of how real this budding relationship feels, and how immersive their exchanges are.
Who is this guy? My brain is racing trying to figure McAvoy’s Michael out, with amply experienced but confused senses trying to spot the dark red flags among all of the blazing green ones.
My intuition on one hand (or from one shoulder) tells me how he might be a genuinely kind man (they do exist!), a guardian angel, a curious Starman-type alien, someone in her past or future circling back to her via sci-fi mechanics…
But on the other shoulder or hand, he could equally be a disguised demon, incarnation of Lucifer, salacious ex-communicated priest, sociopathic conman, or reformed hitman overreaching for redemption.
Or maybe he’s just in the more typical middle of this spectrum from good to evil, like a conservative man with a “I Can Fix Her” mentality or a “nice guy” who’s actively subscribed to a misguided podcast on picking up women.
Yet Michael isn’t awkward or floundering in any way, and while we’re figuring out whether he’s being manipulative or methodical, we’re waiting for the ball to drop.
And boy does that ball ever drop. In a packed audience there were audible gasps, and there were surely tears based on the sheer amount of sniffles (and certainly from where I was sitting).
The ensuing oscillation between a highly personal thriller and tortured soul drama I found to be not just engaging, but invigorating.
Thematically, it exposes the great emotional risk of being a human in this life, and how when your whole world revolves around just one other person, their sudden disappearance means that your whole world can fall apart in an instant.
There’s no other agenda on my part here – if it seems like I’m selling you hard on this little flick, it’s because I am. It bravely walks a tightrope between wholesome and subversive, and that’s what I found refreshing.
So, I suggest you borrow a little of my blind faith and see Faith blind; when it inevitably winds up on your streamer suggestion list, put your phones down and watch it closely and with intent, and I hope you will have the same experience I have just had, because it was far from cheesy and felt low-key glorious.
Faith does not currently have a U.S. release date.
