Starring: Guy Pearce, DeWanda Wise, Bill Pullman

Director: Ned Crowley
Released: 2025

Mood: If you’re a bit gullible and want to watch a dark psychological Western that reminds you that you can’t trust anyone and little girls are always creepy.

I love being surprised by Westerns, especially new Westerns. And holy shit, did Killing Faith surprise me.

I’m a bit of a control freak, and this has manifested in my movie-watching by me looking up everything I can about a movie before seeing it. Even reading the entire plot on Wikipedia, sometimes mid-movie, because I can’t handle not knowing what I’m in for.

Unfortunately, it has sometimes impacted my take on movies. It has made me want to look for good in movies that I didn’t like, and vice versa.

But lately I’ve quit doing that because it messes with the whole point of reviews. Art is subjective, and my reviews are supposed to be my honest thoughts. And nobody should ever take my opinions as facts, because we don’t have identical taste.

So now I’ve gone back to just throwing on a movie and waiting to see what I see. I feel so much better!

Killing Faith is a creepy, graphic, violent religious thriller-horror, which I never in a million years would have had on my Bill Pullman Bingo card. I was deeply disturbed, and delighted.

Killing Faith takes place in the summer of 1849. The opening scene shows a filthy, bloodied man in a small cage, being guarded by a single man. They appear to be in the middle of nowhere. A rough, tough-talking woman (Jamie Neumann) rides up, and shortly executes the man.

Cut to a small blonde child in a farmhouse. She walks outside and goes over to a horse in a pen. We see a Black woman (DeWanda Wise) hanging laundry. When she looks up and sees the little girl her entire demeanour changes and she screams “No!” and the horse drops dead.

We start to learn the fragments of the story – the woman is the child’s mother, and the mute child has a mysterious sickness and has to wear mittens à la Elsa in Frozen because her touch kills. The mother goes into town with the child to ask the acting deputy sheriff about paying someone to escort them to a town where a preacher is rumoured to perform miracles. He tells her that nobody is going to make that journey, especially for that child.

In the holding cell, sleeping off what we learn is another ether hangover, is the local doctor (Guy Pearce). He’s experienced a lot of personal trauma, hence the ether. A stiff white woman (Gail Cronauer) enters the jail and tells him the town wants him out, unless he can pay his monthly mortgage in full.

The doctor is now highly motivated to escort the woman and her child. But even though he knows what she’s capable of, he has no idea what kind of danger awaits everyone in proximity of this child.

If you appreciated Guy Pearce’s brutal physicality in The Proposition, you will absolutely live for how he takes it somehow even further in Killing Faith.

Bender, the doctor, is fighting some serious inner demons. He seems like he can’t even get through a day without passing out, but then he demonstrates seemingly inhuman perseverance on his quest. We see him beaten, shot, and thrown off a cliff, and Pearce realistically carries every single wound forward while taking on more. All with a great moustache.

Now, I didn’t want to see an evil Bill Pullman. I didn’t. I like my sarcastic, sexy Spaceballs Bill Pullman and how sweet and lovable he was in The Ballad of Lefty Brown. But I also applaud this scarily charismatic, dark performance.

The preacher/doctor Ross combines multiple elements that are freaky on their own, but together are just terrifying. Pullman easily flips between a god-fearing, wheelchair-bound leader of the town, a powerful, calculating madman, and a shot-up villain who just won’t die.

Dare I say it, he belongs in my roundup of the best Western villains.

DeWanda Wise is the straight character, and handles it with poise and dignity. She does a great job of showing layers of strength and trauma as a freed slave-slash-landowner and mother. I thought a few of Sarah’s choices felt abrupt and not wholly plausible, but that was the writing, not the actor.

Other brilliant performances – and there are no duds in this cast:

• Jack Alcott as the adorably neurodivergent Edward
• Jamie Neumann as Whitey, who gave me major vibes of Daisy Demorgue in The Hateful Eight and seriously commanded this role
• Raoul Max Trujillo as the mystical wandering William Shakespeare
• Joanna Cassidy as the creepy matriarch Maggie
• Emily Katherine Ford as the little girl

I pretty much just named everyone as standouts, and I stand by it. Everyone has a perspective, everyone is committed, and – best of all – everyone is properly filthy and looks authentic for the time and place.

Killing Faith reminds me a bit of Seraphim Falls, due to its fantastical, occasionally hallucinogenic, supernatural element. Director/writer Ned Crowley has a keen eye for character development, but also for building tension.

This is a fresh story that combines a few popular tropes, and then hits you harder than you expect. Characters are dispensable. Nobody is safe. There is no happy ending.

But the cinematography is absolutely stunning, from the scenic shots to the graphic blood and guts, to the thoughtful lighting. The sets are authentic, the costumes are realistic, and there’s no detail that’s an afterthought.

And although I didn’t really focus on it, make no mistake that this is a BRUTAL movie at its core. It’s not just your average Western shooting and punching action – you see blood pumping out of wounds, multiple faces shot half off, hearts ripped out, and gore aplenty. I love that level of depiction, and even though I wasn’t expecting it, it was right up my alley.

There were a few plot points relating to the little girl that I didn’t get, but maybe others will. I didn’t really mind not getting it. What DID bother me was how much the little girl looks like… me as a kid. Watch the movie and tell me I’m wrong.