Erin Doherty and James McAvoy both bring their A-game in this startling, involving movie from British writer-director Paul Andrew Williams, whose productivity and creativity continue to be an industry tonic. It’s an eerie mystery drama that Doherty and McAvoy perform with ferocious commitment. There’s something of Atom Egoyan or even M Night Shyamalan here … and I even found myself wondering if Williams intended us to think of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Laertes’ lines about his father, Polonius: “… to his good friends thus wide I’ll ope my arms / And like the kind life-rend’ring pelican, / Repast them with my blood.”
We are in a downbeat British town, perhaps somewhere in the London estuary, a place to which a candy factory provides employment. Mina (played by Doherty) is a smart, capable single mum to 9-year-old Jamie (Smylie Bradwell); she works on the production line in cap and hairnet like all the others: much liked by everyone there. She is not fussed by the absence of Jamie’s dad and is perfectly content with hanging out with her friends and her sister (Liv Hill).
One night at a raucous pub quiz, for which she has had to hire a local girl as a babysitter to look after Jamie back at home, Mina finds herself drawn to an enigmatic, self-possessed guy standing by the bar, smiling benignly and drinking something non-alcoholic: this is Michael, played by McAvoy. With easy confidence and a quiet kind of authority, he chats to Mina and she can’t quite read this handsome man or read his intentions. Is he flirting or what? McAvoy’s Scottish accent also blurs the class distinction that may or may not exist between them. After walking her home, charming her and even love-bombing her with devastating compliments, Michael is the perfect gentleman and says he won’t come in. Later, Mina is even more fascinated to learn that Michael volunteers at a local food bank. But how does he earn a living?
Mina’s suspicious sister notes how well-spoken he is; she has perhaps picked up on something that the audience might also have noticed, that Michael has something secretive and supercilious about him. She wonders if he is or was a teacher, or if this food bank is some sort of court-ordered community service. But Mina won’t hear of any disparagement of this obviously remarkable man who is paying her the kind of attention she hasn’t had in a very long time. Michael comes round to their house and is a huge hit with Jamie; he asks Jamie if he likes computer games and goes upstairs with him to Jamie’s bedroom to play Super Mario Kart, while Mina, glowing at Michael’s quasi-paternal instincts, stays downstairs to chat with her sister.
Williams shrewdly controls the film’s growing, complex mood: a cocktail of dread, fascination and something else, as if Mina has been made a party to some occult conspiracy that Michael isn’t in any hurry to reveal. He already seems to know something about Mina’s babysitter that Mina herself hasn’t suspected. The film’s central dramatic events then kick the mood up into a higher gear. Mina is passionate, bewildered and Michael assumes the priestly air of someone who has seen it all before and who is either here to help or is some kind of vampiric outsider. The problem seemed initially to be that he was too good to be true. Clearly that isn’t the issue.
Williams’s alpha-grade cast present this tale of mystery with intelligence and focus and Williams shoots his principals often in looming closeup, as if the drama’s strange secret could be read in the faces themselves.
• Faith screened at the Toronto film festival.
