‘Some preacher hocus pocus ain’t gonna make a damn bit of difference…’
After decades in the wilderness, creators like Tyler Sheridan (Yellowstone, Hell or High Water) and S. Craig Zahler (Bone Tomahawk) have brought the humble Western kicking and screaming back into the public consciousness. Killing Faith, the second film from writer-director Ned Crowley, draws from these neo-Westerns, but with a darkly playful mean streak added in for good measure…
In 1849, recently freed slave, Sarah (DeWanda Wise) convinces widowed physician, Dr. Bender (Guy Pearce), to escort her and her unnamed Caucasian daughter (Emily Ford) on a long journey to find a faith healer. Both Sarah and everyone else in her immediate vicinity believe that her daughter is cursed to kill everything that she touches and so she is forced to wear mitts on her hands the whole time.
While I found the immediate introduction of the supernatural a little jarring at first, once you get past that, it’s easy to get lost in the richness of the characters, and the scenic beauty of Santa Fe, New Mexico (where the majority of filming took place). Pearce is an actor who just makes sense as part of a Western, and he’s truly excellent here, delivering one of his finest late era performances in a role that could have so easily succumbed to cliche. Aside from the magic realism, the story itself is pretty derivative, but that’s because the concept of having to travel long distances across unforgiving terrain at a time of such wanton cruelty and violence will never not be compelling. And so it is here. Within the familiarity of the overarching narrative, Crowley provides enough twists and turns to ensure that it never feels repetitive or stale, and by the end, I was fully invested in whether Sarah and the good doctor would succeed in their seemingly impossible task.
There have been a spate of excellent neo-Westerns recently that straddle the line between traditional Westerns and desert horror – Killing Faith sits nicely alongside its peers as a film of real substance.
