The genius of Hugh Grant’s big horror turn in Heretic is that, really, he’s the same Hugh Grant as before. He still rushes headfirst into his sentences, only to end them with a sheepish smile. He still parcels out morsels of sincerity with a shrug and a chuckle, bashful at any admission of vulnerability. In short, he’s irresistibly charismatic. The targets of his character Mr Reed, Mormon missionaries Sister Paxton (Chloe East) and Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher), concur right up to the point they realise they’re inside a horror film.
Grant’s performance is all the more frightening because he never leans into the bug-eyed, grinning, head-tilted trademarks of onscreen psychopathy. Instead, he remains unnervingly placid and casual, which transforms this latest offering from Scott Beck and Bryan Woods into a story about the abject terror of being cornered by a man addicted to debate. Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton have come to Mr Reed’s home with the intent to convert him to their faith, only for him to immediately turn the tables on them by confronting them with their church’s past doctrine of polygamy.
But he’s just curious, really. All is well – his wife is just in the kitchen, baking a blueberry pie. She’ll be through in a minute. Much like the hapless American couple at the centre of recent horror remake Speak No Evil, Barnes and Paxton nervously laugh off his more brusque qualities, attributing it to some English eccentricity. What happens next is essentially if a theology discussion were conducted by Saw’s Jigsaw.
And, while Beck and Woods flirt with convention in the film’s later stages, as it grows wilder and more gruesome, Heretic is a wordy horror that holds up surprisingly well under scrutiny. For a creative duo most famous for co-writing the largely dialogue-free horror, A Quiet Place, it’s a canny way for Beck and Woods to avoid accusations of being one-trick ponies.
East and Thatcher have the less showy roles here, but they’ve taken the foundations laid out in the script and built from them intelligent, self-possessed women. Paxton, at first, comes across as the sheltered naïf, who talks about Magnum condoms as if she were observing alien fauna, but, soon enough, we’re reminded innocence is not the same as ignorance. Heretic is a game of observation, of what the viewer perceives versus the characters. Even when Mr Reed starts waffling on about comparative mythology, it’s worth paying attention – he makes some salient points, but he’s not as impervious an intellectual as he makes himself out to be.
Beck and Woods, interestingly, hold back on making any concrete statements about faith. But it’s respectfully done, in a way that acknowledges that the question of God has no answer, and that we’re all ultimately gambling in the dark. Ambivalence seeps into the film’s bones, especially in how cinematographer Chung Chung Hoon (known for his work with Park Chan Wook on features such as Oldboy (2003) and Stoker) allows the camera to slide down the most shadowy of halls. It adds an extra chill to the clever, labyrinthine Heretic. So does the scene where Grant does an impression of Jar Jar Binks. There are nightmares of all kinds out there.
Dir: Scott Beck, Bryan Woods. Starring: Hugh Grant, Sophie Thatcher, Chloe East, Topher Grace, Elle Young. 15, 111 mins
‘Heretic’ is in cinemas from 1 November
