Guy Pearce and the Girl with the Death Touch | Killing Faith (AKA Devil in the Dust) (REVIEW) | Projector Shorts - video Dailymotion

Film Brain

Film Brain reviews this supernatural Western, with a girl that seemingly has the power of death by touch, but this meditation on evil is unfortunately very dry.

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00:00Guy Pearce rides with a girl with the touch of death in the Supernatural Western Killing Faith,

00:06which was released in the UK as Devil in the Dust.

00:09Set in 1849, Pearce plays an ether-addicted doctor who is hired to escort Dewanda Wise and her daughter,

00:16who has a mysterious affliction that anything that touches her skin immediately dies.

00:21Wise wants to bring out a preacher, Bill Pullman, who she believes holds the last hope to potentially cure her,

00:27but Pearce is sceptical.

00:28Killing Faith is helmed by Ned Crowley, who also wrote the script,

00:32and it has all the ingredients for what could be an intriguing Western like a strong premise in the cast,

00:37but it lacks one very important thing.

00:40A pulse.

00:41It's a shame because the cast do what they can, but they're stranded by the material.

00:46Pearce is committed as the grieving and jaded doctor who has lost his own wife and daughter

00:50and carries that guilt as well as his reputation around town for being unable to save his patients.

00:56His bad luck continues on his mission because he's the antithesis of Clint Eastwood,

01:01and is a pretty ineffectual hero getting held up, knocked out, and turned into a bloody mess.

01:07But if he is faithless, then Dewanda Wise's freed slave is all about her devotion to God

01:12and wanting her daughter to be exorcised of the demon she thinks is inside of her.

01:16This is a West where death looms large because of a recent outbreak of disease,

01:21and the film tries to poke at superstition and public hysteria,

01:25partly through the dynamic between the two leads,

01:27where the rational Pearce thinks the girl is more likely to be a carrier,

01:31but he finds something to believe in.

01:34The story might sound like the premise for a horror film, but it really isn't,

01:38and while there's a few moments of grisly violence,

01:40I honestly wish that it leaned more into the genre elements or a sort of surrealism

01:45to enliven the flat execution.

01:48Too much of the film involves them journey across the desert,

01:51bumping into other characters that drift in and out of the story,

01:54like a strange episode where Joanna Cassidy heads up a family of gold diggers

01:58who have been out in the sun too long and have gone a bit Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

02:02Aside from some dodgy CGI muzzle flashes and blood spurts,

02:06the film's competently made, but it's shot in a functional, even bland way,

02:11and the pacing is so slow, you wonder if the horses are going backwards.

02:16It doesn't help that the unnamed girl isn't really a character,

02:19she's a MacGuffin for things to happen to, or the characters to project upon,

02:23but is functionally mute and naive, which is just a huge missed opportunity.

02:29Things improve in the third act when Bill Pullman finally enters over 70 minutes in,

02:34and he's clearly enjoying getting to ham it up in a wheelchair

02:36and puncture the grim self-serious toad,

02:39but it's far too late to save the movie.

02:42It just doesn't come to life,

02:44and the whole thing is so dry that watching it felt like sucking on a plain unsalted cracker.

02:50But...

02:50...

02:57...

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Guy Pearce and the Girl with the Death Touch | Killing Faith (AKA Devil in the Dust) (REVIEW) | Projector Shorts

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