Paul Andrew Williams’s Faith was among the British entries screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, offering an eerie, suspenseful drama anchored by two central performances. The film follows Mina, a capable single mother who lives in a downbeat town sustained in part by a local candy factory, and who is drawn into an unsettling relationship with a mysterious suitor.
Performances
Erin Doherty plays Mina, a 9‑year‑old’s mother who is content with her life and well regarded by her coworkers on the factory line. James McAvoy appears as the enigmatic figure who courts her. Critics at the screening singled out both actors for their intensity and focus; the film depends on the ferocious commitment they bring to often quietly charged scenes.
Tone and influences
Faith is built as a tightly controlled mystery, its atmosphere described by one reviewer as startling and involving. The reviewer suggested tonal echoes of filmmakers such as Atom Egoyan and M. Night Shyamalan, and even drew a literary allusion to lines from Shakespeare’s Hamlet to capture the film’s unsettling mixture of intimacy and menace.
Setting and story
Much of the film is set in a grey, workaday British town — perhaps by the London estuary — where the candy factory provides routine and employment. Mina balances single parenthood and factory work with what appears to be comparatively ordinary daily life, a normalcy that the arrival of the suitor begins to destabilise.
Direction and craft
Williams, who wrote and directed the film, keeps the drama taut and the revelations measured, allowing the central performances and the film’s mood to carry its escalating tension. The result is an eerie, slowly compounding mystery rather than a conventional thriller, one that leaves viewers unsettled rather than offering easy answers.
Reception
Faith reinforces Williams’s reputation for productive, creative work and stands out at the festival for its performances and controlled atmosphere rather than spectacle. Audiences and critics at Toronto noted the film’s careful construction and the actors’ forceful commitments as its primary strengths.