Killing Faith: Abandon Expectation, This Western Doesn’t Care About Shooting Straight

By Thom Ernst

Rating: A-

Damn, Killing Faith is one weird western.

Is that a good thing? I’d say yes. Still, I confess I wasn’t always sure what I was watching. The film fiddles with the genre in ways that splinter expectations, yet with nods to the traditions that keep westerns alive.

It’s a story of redemption, sure, but writer-director Ned Crowley, with co-writer David Henri Martin, doesn’t so much ride that familiar trail as he does saddle the story to something that resembles a Greek tragedy.

The setting is classic enough: late-1800s America, all dust, grit, and endless horizons. But Crowley can’t resist tugging the saddle out from under us by staging it as though the frontier has been nudged toward apocalypse. A plague rages through the land, killing cattle, crippling communities, and generally souring the mood. And yet, the real contagion isn’t the disease. It’s the people.

Front and centre is Sarah, played with steady conviction by DeWanda Wise. This is not Wise’s first rodeo, having appeared in the western The Harder They Fall (2021). Sarah is a free Black woman in a town that “accepts” her in the way people accept any unavoidable inconveniences like taxes and cavities.

What they can’t abide is the child she’s raising, Emily Katherine Ford, known only as The Girl. Blonde, pale, and with the kind of death-stare usually reserved for horror movie dolls, the Girl never utters a single word. Her silence is unnerving, her gaze even more so. The townsfolk hold her responsible for the plague, and frankly, Crowley doesn’t rush to prove them wrong.

If the Girl is their scapegoat, then poor Bender, the town’s doctor, is their punching bag. Played by Guy Pearce, Bender is a man hollowed out by grief, so gutted by the death of his wife and child that he can barely tend to himself, let alone his patients.

“What’s it like to be a doctor who can’t save lives?” someone sneers at him. His reply: “I’ll let you know the next time you’re sick.” A question Bender is resigned to answering far too often.

Circumstance throws Sarah, Bender, and the Girl together on a trek across hostile country. Their journey is a dangerous mix of threats: plague, bandits, bounty hunters, and the ever-present risk of characters wandering in just to deliver cryptic lines before vanishing again. It plays less like a straight western and more like a fever dream odyssey, an American frontier version of Ulysses if Homer packed six-shooters.

There are twists in the film that require a kind of free-form viewing, not allowing the audience to settle on any one concept of what they’re watching. It’s as much a western as anything by John Ford, but if Ford were to recite a tale from a Cormac McCarthy nightmare.

And then there’s the pleasure of seeing Joanna Cassidy (Zhora, snake-wearing Replicant from 1982’s Blade Runner) show up as Maggie, the matron of a diseased-ridden family who, in another film, might have walked straight off the set of a Rob Zombie picture.

Not to be overlooked is Jack Alcott as Edward, the scene-stealing, talkative farmhand with a heart so open it practically collects prairie dust. His affections for Sarah are both sweet and tragic. Alcott finds the exact note of guileless devotion. His Edward is what someone on the spectrum might have looked like before autism was even recognized as a diagnosis.

Killing Faith doesn’t shy away from violence or cruelty, but it also refuses to linger. The camera pulls back at key moments, giving us only glimpses of atrocities that lodge deeper in the subconscious than any graphic display could. The result is a western that entertains, unsettles and, yes, confuses.

But confusion here isn’t failure, it’s design. Crowley and Martin have made a western that sidesteps convention without losing sight of what draws us to the genre in the first place: redemption, survival, and the harsh beauty of a lawless frontier. It may not always add up to expectations, but it adds up to something.

Is Killing Faith a great western? Hard to say. Is it worth seeing? Absolutely. Because sometimes it’s the films that bewilder us that leave the deepest marks: hoofprints on wet grass, difficult to follow but impossible to forget.

Killing Faith. Directed by Ned Crowley. Starring DeWanda Wise, Guy Pearce, Joanna Cassidy, Jack Alcott and Bill Pulman. In select theatres October 3.