What if Hugh Grant promised you a freshly baked blueberry pie? It sounds like a dream scenario plucked from an inviting Christmas rom-com, but directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods use it as the basis for something wonderfully sinister.
Few films have been as simultaneously silly and pulse-pounding as Heretic, a tale of two young Mormon missionaries lured into an elaborate test of faith. The film is Saw for Reddit atheism, anchored by a delightfully devious performance from Grant, whose career heartthrob status is turned on its head. The plot may as well be improvised, given how each reveal seems to emanate from nowhere, but the precision with which the directing duo turns each screw is a marvel to behold. Heretic shouldn’t work, and the fact that it does is a twisted miracle.
A huge part of Heretic’s success is how quickly it endears us to its protagonists: Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East). In the movie’s opening scene, the young evangelists walk on eggshells as they try to discuss the male anatomy and “porno-nography” while seated on a bench plastered with a giant condom ad. The world is large, and they’ve only experienced a small sliver, which becomes all the more apparent as they walk around a quaint mountain town attempting to spread the word of Joseph Smith. A group of teens even bullies the bespectacled Paxton — the more sheltered of the duo — humiliating her by exposing her religious undergarments. Mormonism is an easy punchline in popular culture, but Heretic quickly establishes sympathy for the sisters, which comes in handy when they reach the isolated home of Mr. Reed (Grant) in the middle of a downpour.
Reed has requested more information from his local Mormon chapter, and his is the first door to stay open for Barnes and Paxton all day. According to the sisters’ doctrine, stepping inside his home requires the presence of another woman, but luckily Reed’s wife is in the next room preparing the aforementioned pie, or so he claims. The character is charming, jovial, and slightly anxious in that familiar Hugh Grant manner, though the more the camera lingers on him, the more this translates into a subtle shiftiness that keeps the young women on edge. Although he regales them with curious questions about their faith, he seems to press them as well on matters of Mormon controversy as they await his wife’s culinary delights. (The film is rolling out with special “sensory screenings” that involve a pivotal blueberry scent.)
However, it isn’t long until the rug is slowly pulled out from under them. Reed lures the sisters into a windowless library filled with religious books and iconography. Like a lonely internet troll — albeit one with a more dignified front — he foists intellectual debate upon them, whether they like it or not, with screeds and questions that grow too intimate for comfort. Before long, they begin to understand he has no plans of letting them leave until they play his elaborate game of faith, involving debates, alleged exit doors marked “belief” and “disbelief,” and something far more sinister hidden in his cellar.
To reveal any more would rob viewers of discovering how downright odd the movie gets, as well as how literal it makes its Sartre-esque philosophical conundrums. Heretic leaves little room to actually ruminate on theological debate, though that’s sort of the point. Reed’s intellectual approach to religious inquiry has its limits and becomes hilariously akin to a Dan Brown novel. The movie constantly swerves like one as well. It does for internet atheism what The Menu did for fine dining, turning it into a spectacle of principled rage, led by a man with a misguided bone to pick. But where The Menu’s Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) murdered his way through despicable, wealthy leeches, before staring down a precocious young woman who challenged his principles, Reed comes face-to-face with two such characters from the get-go, perhaps by design. Laced beneath his veneer of charm is a sense of aggressive indignity and entitlement, which colors his entire scheme as some kind of sexist power play.
That Barnes and Paxton respond to Reed’s challenge by meeting him on his level is amusing all on its own, since they immediately speak high school debate-style language, laden with the kind of definitive, didactic statements found in internet comments sections. It’s as though the dialogue were reverse-engineered from Baby’s First Book on Atheism (perhaps The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins), or an internet comments section on the subject. Its basic observations about the way religions have cross-pollinated throughout history and the way they enact their dogmas are revealed with enough bombast to blow the mind of any 12-year-old who hasn’t yet looked into the subject. And yet, there’s tongue-in-cheek delight in watching even this rote form of argument play out, since it forms the basis of a perverse game of life and death — a ridiculous scenario the young missionaries have no choice but to treat with the utmost seriousness.
While there’s a banality to Heretic’s theological musings — little is revealed or challenged about the nature of faith, and even Reed’s attempts to demonstrate religious control feel too contrived to make a lasting point — these themes end up secondary to the movie’s riveting claustrophobia. Grant’s faux-polite performance, while typically “Grant-esque” on the surface, is yanked from its rom-com context by Chung Chung-hoon’s suffocating cinematography, with dirty frames and soft focus that partially obscure his true intentions, but hint toward them constantly.
The actresses are just as capable as Grant, despite being saddled with more traditionally damsel roles. Thatcher’s Barnes is the more burdened of the two, as well as the more driven, while East plays Paxton with more reserve. This distinction helps usher along the plot, since it quickly establishes who leads and who follows. Granted, this exacerbates the issue of Heretic by leaving no actual room for thought or debate, despite its central “game” involving wrestling with one’s faith.
However, despite being intellectually shallow, the film proves incredibly visceral in its unfurling, with increasingly dark and winding spaces that, although they push incredulity — how deep can one man’s house go? — make for viciously fun horror set pieces steeped in jaw-dropping, kitchen-sink strangeness. At more points than not, the premise itself seems to flip on its head, and then back again, before flipping once more, creating a kind of narrative whiplash with regard to what the movie and its villain are all about, until the young missionaries, and the audience, have no choice but to cede control.
With Heretic, Beck and Woods appear to have mastered controlled chaos, resulting in a horror-thriller that’s wildly exciting despite its inherent flaws. It won’t leave you changed or challenged, but it’ll most certainly keep you gripping fistfuls of popcorn.
