‘Faith’ Review: Erin Doherty and James McAvoy Excel in a Sensitive Drama That Goes Off the Rails in the Final Reel

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. Related Stories Movies Why Chase Infiniti and Christopher Briney Would Have Moved Heaven and Earth to Star in 'The Julia Set' Movies TIFF Flashback: Naomi Watts Cruised Into Toronto via 'Mulholland' Faith The Bottom Line Just fine until a silly swerve. Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Special Presentations) Cast: Erin Doherty, James McAvoy, Liv Hill, Smylie Bradwell, Nuala Poulter, Clea Martin, Jason Milligan, Missie Milligan, Laura McAlpine, Director/screenwriter: Paul Andrew Williams 1 hour 48 minutes

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.