Faith review – intense performances power startling and unsettling tale of mysterious suitor

Toronto film festival: Erin Doherty plays a happily single mother in a downbeat town courted by an enigmatic James McAvoy in this expertly taut drama 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…