Director: Ned Crowley
Writer: Ned Crowley
Stars: Guy Pearce, DeWanda Wise, Bill Pullman
Synopsis: In 1849 a widowed doctor escorts a freed slave and her daughter across the West to find a distant Faith Healer. The mother believes the girl is possessed. The doctor suspects disease. But one fact remains-everything the child touches dies.
The Western genre that was born of the myth-making and romanticizing of the American West has been recontextualized. Most modern filmmakers, and really most Westerns after The Wild Bunch, understand the sheer brutality of that time and space in American history. This is why the modern Western has had success blending with horror. Films like Bone Tomahawk and Ravenous bring frontier horrors to their zenith. The film Killing Faith attempts that as well.
Though, Killing Faith feels almost like a dystopian film more than a Western or horror.
The barren landscape, leaders who inspire cult-like devotion, and characters driven mad by circumstance are seen throughout the film. The outside world, while present in the jabberings of Edward (Jack Alcott), seems so far away from these people or their lives. The things they encounter and the things happening to them seem so utterly wretched and horrific like they’re the last ones left alive.
It’s almost a disappointment that the religious horror elements come in at all. That is the weakest part of Ned Crowley’s script. It becomes a push and pull between Bender’s (Guy Pearce) science and Sarah’s (DeWanda Wise) faith, but neither is very strong in their convictions. The story doesn’t give them enough motivation and the explanations are dull or thrown away like they didn’t matter.
What seems to matter most to Crowley as a filmmaker is the gory set pieces. These are made all the more wickedly disgusting by the makeup team of Rocky Faulkner, Lisa Hansell, and Delano Viers. They craft some truly grim wounds and bloody faces. In addition to that is production designer Lorus Allen whose team added to the grim and gruesome nature of the land around our characters.
It’s hard to watch a film that doesn’t fully want to commit to itself. The supernatural or religious horror film is a staple of the genre, but it feels out of place in a Western. So much of Westerns is about Darwinism and an exploration of Nietzsche, the law and outlaw always in contention. The preacher character in a traditional Western shows the fallibility of man in times of crisis, but is rarely portrayed as Ross (Bill Pullman) is. The preacher is a figure of pity and it’s hard to reconcile that with the need to be a source of strength for good or evil that that archetype embodies in a supernatural horror film. It especially doesn’t make sense as Ross is the preacher, but also the town baron making his purpose even more muddied.
Though, future supernatural horror filmmakers should take note of one thing. If you want your creepy kid character to be truly creepy, have them silent. One of the strangest and creepiest scenes in Killing Faith comes near the very beginning as the child, credited as The Girl (Emily Ford), takes off her mittens and walks out to a horse minding its own business. Sarah notices The Girl has taken off her mittens, the significance of which we don’t know yet. The Girl puts her hand on the bent head of a horse and as Sarah lets out a blood curdling, “No!,” the horse drops dead. The entire time The Girl is silent. She doesn’t even make any real facial expressions. We know from this she’s bad news even if we have no clue why or what just happened. Very creepy.
Killing Faith wants to be unique. It wants to have a genre sandwich, but instead of the layers of genre fixings piled into a neat package, they spill out in odd ways and the whole thing falls apart. It’s not a poorly made film from a technical standpoint and the acting is solid, it’s just the story and plot that leave much to be desired.
