‘Killing Faith’ Review: Guy Pearce Faces the Devil in a Ruthless Western

A lean, austere, slow-burning western that steadily gathers force as it unfolds, Killing Faith is one of those hidden gems that occasionally surfaces to remind us just how powerful the western remains as a vehicle for telling stark, uncompromising stories. Like S. Craig Zahler’s Bone Tomahawk—a film, and a filmmaker, that inevitably come to mind, even if this movie never reaches those same heights—Ned Crowley’s (Middle Man) film blends the western with supernatural horror. Imagine something halfway between a Cormac McCarthy tale and a descendant of The Exorcist, with a touch of the Australian outback’s unforgiving sensibility.

From the opening scene, in which an innocent-looking blonde girl kills a horse simply by placing her hand on its forehead, it’s clear that something deeply unsettling lurks beneath the surface. Brutal, bleak, yet punctuated by moments of unexpected dark humor, the film unfolds as a road movie in which every encounter grows more dangerous and unsettling than the last, exposing the violence that lay at the heart of the American frontier.

The journey begins with that seemingly detached little girl (Emily Ford), whose reputation as either «possessed» or a literal manifestation of the Devil has spread throughout the small Arizona town where she lives with her mother, Sarah (DeWanda Wise), a formerly enslaved woman, in 1849. Convinced she can no longer stay there, Sarah decides to take her daughter to a larger town where a preacher named Ross (Bill Pullman) is said to have the power to cure whatever afflicts her. With few alternatives, the only person willing to accompany them is Dr. Bender (Guy Pearce), a physician haunted by personal tragedy, notorious for his addiction to ether, and deeply skeptical of anything supernatural. They are eventually joined by Edward (Jack Alcott), Sarah’s young assistant—a well-meaning, naive, and endlessly talkative kid.

Killing Faith follows this unlikely quartet across an unforgiving landscape where they repeatedly cross paths with people driven by greed, desperation, fanaticism, or something even darker. Some want their belongings, others want the girl, and others… well, you’ll see. Almost no one can be trusted, reinforcing Dr. Bender’s deeply cynical worldview. Sarah, at least initially, remains more open-hearted. Yet nearly every seemingly peaceful encounter eventually erupts into shocking violence, often after long stretches of quiet conversation, making each explosion of bloodshed feel all the more jarring.

Crowley favors extended, dialogue-driven scenes whose simmering tension recalls Quentin Tarantino’s, only to shatter them with sudden gunfire, knife attacks, or bursts of gruesome violence. Is the seemingly possessed child somehow responsible for what unfolds or does the violence come from something more human? The film constantly walks the line between grounded realism—at least within the conventions of the western—and the supernatural, leaving us to wonder whether these acts of savagery stem from demonic influence or simply from the darkness that already exists inside people.

A grimy, exhausted, perpetually irritable Guy Pearce is perfectly cast as Bender, whose bitterness and despair gradually give way to an unlikely form of heroism as he becomes the girl’s reluctant protector. Sarah’s own secrets emerge gradually, revealing the painful history that shapes her determination. Joanna Cassidy makes a memorable appearance as a perverse frontier woman, while the film’s final stretch belongs largely to Bill Pullman, whose performance lends his preacher an unsettling ambiguity that keeps you wondering whether he represents salvation or something more sinister.

Killing Faith is one of those harsh, uncompromising westerns that portrays the frontier as a land ruled by cruelty, where mercy is scarce and humanity even scarcer. Along its almost biblical path toward the possibility of redemption, its characters seem to pass through every imaginable circle of hell on earth. It’s a violent, bitter experience in the tradition of the revisionist westerns of the 1970s, when Hollywood dismantled the noble mythology of westward expansion. An anti-western, if you like—or perhaps, more pointedly, a film that suggests the American West of then remains the blueprint for the one we inhabit today.