AFI Fest Review: Faults

Riley Stearns' Faults is exactly what one would expect, and even hope, for an indie debut to be.  It doesn't excel in any particular way, but is rather across-the-board solid, revaling the writer-director's potential without really wowwing.  It's enough to make one interested in what Stears will make next, even as it starts to fade from memory as the credits end and you leave the theater behind.

Named after the cult that features in the film, Faults finds cult mind-control expert Ansel Roth (Leland Orser) desperate for cash.  His show was cancelled after 23 tapings, his new book is a rehash of his first and thus isn't selling, and he owes his manager Terry (Jon Gries) money.  Lots of money.  Money that is going to be collected by the menacing Mick (Lance Reddick).  As he hits bottom, and sleeps in his car, an opportunity falls into Ansel's lap: a couple seeks his help in "deprogramming" their daughter Claire (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Stearns' wife) after she falls in with the mysterious Faults.

A good portion of the film is an effective two-hander, with Ansel and Claire in a hotel room undergoing the deprogramming process.  There are comedy and thriller elements, along with some supernatural undertones to keep things interesting.  Orser and Winstead are both great, the former balancing sleeze and charm via desperation, the latter packing her performance tight with nuance, blossoming more as the film goes on.  There's a strange, sick chemistry between the two, on great display in the hotel room scenes, especially when Stearns sits the characters down and has them talk it out, the camera barely zooming, building suspense that the straightforward dialogue doesn't obviously possess.

Where the film goes isn't particularly surprising, but it does so with meticulous thematic focus.  The cult gets its name from the idea that a fault (as in, the geographical feature) gives way to change, and the group give people the potential to shed their own identity and work on "leveling up" to a form beyond this physical world.  Some of the twists are more surprising than others, but they all work.  The battle between free will and control is finely articulated in the low-key drama and the more bizarre flourishes that punctuate it.

As in a fault, the building pressure gives way to great change, and a suitably creepy ending.  As far as the recent run of cult-focused films go, Faults doesn't rise head-and-shoulders above the rest.  But Stearns gives the genre a nice twist, never actually showing the cult, but rather focusing on the process of getting someone out, or in.