The Western genre may be in better shape than it’s been in a long time. Taylor Sheridan has turned Yellowstone and its growing network of spin-offs into one of the clearest signs that there’s still a very large audience for such stories. On the big screen, though, returns have been far more uncertain. As a result, some of the genre’s most interesting recent entries have arrived more quietly through VOD and festival premieres before eventually finding a wider audience on streaming.
That route has produced a small but fairly reliable run of sleeper hits, especially when a film folds in elements from other genres. Bone Tomahawk became a cult favorite that way a decade ago, while The Wind and In a Valley of Violence found similar afterlives. The latest film to take that path is a low-budget frontier thriller that made little noise in theaters last fall and is now sitting near the top of HBO Max’s global movie charts almost a year after its release.
‘Killing Faith’ Is Finding a Wider Audience on Streaming
The film is Killing Faith, writer-director Ned Crowley’s supernatural Western starring Guy Pearce, DeWanda Wise, and Bill Pullman. According to FlixPatrol, it recently climbed as high as No. 2 on HBO Max’s worldwide Top 10 movies chart, finishing ahead of titles including Murderer Report, Halloween Kills, Despicable Me 4, Green Lantern, and Ready Player One. The film also spent several days at No. 1 in places including Argentina, Brazil, the Bahamas, and Belize before beginning to slip down the charts this week.
Given its reported $7 million budget and minimal theatrical footprint, this looks very much like the kind of streaming second life its distributor might have hoped it’d find. Killing Faith trades in the same unromantic frontier that Sheridan’s 1883 did, a West defined by violence and the constant nearness of death. Set in the Arizona territory in 1849 as a mysterious plague ravages the land, the story follows Sarah, a formerly enslaved woman played by Wise, whose young daughter appears to kill anything she touches.
With their paranoid town turning against them, Sarah hires Pearce’s Dr. Bender, a grieving, ether-addicted physician who’s lost his faith in the world, to escort them across hostile country and reach Pullman’s celebrated preacher, who may or may not be able to cure the girl. There is also an obvious thematic overlap with the kinds of stories Stephen King has long been drawn to, particularly those centered on children whose apparent gifts carry something darker, which may help explain why the film appears to have landed with him.
Stephen King Was an Early Fan of ‘Killing Faith’
In September 2025, shortly after the film premiered at Beyond Fest, King posted his review on X, calling it “a quasi-supernatural Western that has echoes of Cormac McCarthy,” and adding that “the first scene, involving a child and a horse, is an authentic shocker.”
Killing Faith holds a 78% score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 66% audience score, with RogerEbert.com‘s Clint Worthington among those praising it as a bold anti-Western, while some viewers seemed thrown by its genre-blending and its slide from grounded drama into something stranger. There’s also at least a plausible argument that King’s endorsement has helped the film’s profile, given his habit of drawing attention to under-the-radar releases.
Killing Faith is streaming now on HBO Max internationally and on Hulu in the US.
- Release Date
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October 3, 2025
- Runtime
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108 minutes
- Director
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Ned Crowley
