2024 | rated R | starring Hugh Grant, Sophie Thatcher, Chloe East | written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods | 1h 51m | 3 1/2 out of 5 stars |
If you wrote off writer/director team Scott Beck and Bryan Woods after their lame dinosaur movie 65 or their even lamer haunted theme park movie Haunt, it’s time to reconsider the filmmaking duo. Heretic is a standout movie. Even if it doesn’t entirely work, it’s something fresh that doesn’t quite fit into any existing horror movie box. It defies tropes and predictability at every turn, is full of smart characters and is written with thought and care. It’s a talky horror movie that makes room for existential fear as well as some bloodletting.
Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher, Yellowjackets) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East, The Wolf of Snow Hollow) are two Mormon missionaries spreading the word of Joseph Smith door to door. One rainy day they come upon the house of Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant), who invites them in to hear more about the church and engage in a theological discussion with the two girls. Soon they learn that they can’t leave and have been trapped there to have their belief put to the test by Mr. Reed.
Heretic opens like gangbusters. A beautiful opening shot of a Utah mountain range and the girls sitting on a bench. In their first few conversations the movie tightly outlines their characters, with Barnes as the missionary more experienced in both the church and life and Paxton less so, but enthusiastic about her mission. When Grant enters the movie (what amounts to essentially a single location, 3-hander of a film) he delivers the same mix of charm and awkwardness that made him such a reliable rom-com leading man. This is a star turn for the actor, a man whose entered the villain and oompa loompa phase of his career following Paddington 2, Wonka and the HBO miniseries The Undoing. Unlike the mustache twirling of Paddington, Heretic requires the actor to slowly reveal his more sinister ulterior layers, keeping the girls remaining calm and engaged until it’s too late to back out. Even when those layers are revealed they, it’s such a strange and fresh character that we still, kind of, root for him. Even as he starts to imprison the girls the charm remains, making going through his trails seem far more reasonable than the usual snarling, vicious villain movies like this tend to deploy. Mr. Reed isn’t a lunatic, he’s an academic with a promise: go through his experiment and become more enlightened.
Barnes and Paxton are two of the smarter characters we’ve had in a recent horror movie. They’re only held back by kindness or the social stigma of seeming impolite. When they get trapped in a room with a window, table and chair and you’re first thought is “why don’t they put the chair on the table to reach the window” it’s literally the first thing they try. As Reed starts to ask questions designed to make them question their faith, Barnes has thoughtful answers. When it seems like the most awkward moment of the night is Reed’s question about polygamy, the girls counter with a discussion of Mormon history. Both sides of the debate are written with equal intelligence, which is refreshing. It’s the first half of this film where the film shines – when it is built on a series of discussions and increasingly alarming signals (Mr. Reed’s “wife” who never seems to leave the kitchen) that nothing is what it seems. The centerpiece of all of it is a lengthy monologue Grant delivers about the different iterations of religions involving game boards, records and Jar Jar Binks.
It’s the 2nd half of the movie where it announces that those conversations are over, the tension is realized and the movie turns into, for lack of a better word, a “horror movie” is when it starts running dry in the pacing and creative department. It still has a few fun tricks up its sleeve, but it pales in comparison to the possibilities set up in the first half.
The biggest mystery with the film, and the one that effects how effective it is, centers around Beck and Woods’ intentions with Reed. If Reed is intended as a mouthpiece for the filmmakers wrapped in the more palatable role of a villain to make its points about faith and religion, then it’s the same kind of academic atheist pseudo-intellectual case we hear all the time in movies. If Reed is designed to work through the filmmaker’s skeptical questions about religion but ultimately something of a mockery of that kind of pseudo-intellectual atheist academic-type, then it’s more successful.
I say that because Reed and the movie ultimately move away from very interesting questions to the illusion of profound answers. That I’m not leaning one way or another, is a symptom of the film’s desire to stay enigmatic in its goal even when it delivers “answers”. By the time Heretic turns into a very tame Saw film, the answers we get are pretty pedestrian. It’s something that would be great in your average horror movie, but Heretic might be a victim of its own cleverness. When the set-up is this good, I’m expecting a booming payoff. As for the horror elements, the movie isn’t committed
I’m not sure where modern filmmaking master Chan-Wook Park has disappeared to, but his cinematographer Chung-Hoon Chung (Oldboy, Stoker, The Handmaiden) is making little movies like this look spectacular. Like his work with Bong-Joon Ho’s Parasite, he takes a single location and swirls the camera around it to find creative new angles to tell the story visually. Also in the Plus column is a star-making performance from Chloe East. While Grant has the big showstopping performance and Thatcher delivers her reliable strength, East has the film’s arc and heart and puts in all together beautifully.
Here’s a deep cut. While the movies approaching the topic from different angles, Heretic does feel like it shares some thematic DNA with Eric Rohmer’s 1969 French film My Night at Maud’s. In that movie, a devout catholic man spends an evening with a couple and has his faith challenged by the free-spirited sexual nature of an eccentric woman. Where in this movie, Hugh Grant tries to reason these two girls out of their faith with a lecture, in Maud, Maud’s very tangible appears to every crack in the hero’s belief system is far more effective. Maud flirts with, and exploits, his every not-fully-conceived idea where Heretic takes the modern Hollywood approach that you just have to beat someone over the head with someone and they will come to your side.
While I wish I was a bigger fan of this movie than I ultimately am, there is a lot of good stuff here. It’s performances & technical merits and the smart first act make it worth a watch. It’s fresh and unique in a time when few things are, and it will keep the brain active and turning much more than most horror movies. It also feels far too often like your pompous atheist friend who lectures everyone about how Jesus wasn’t really born on December 25th like he’s blowing your mind with his galaxy brain intellect, when really it’s just a guy who researched something until he got the conclusion he wanted and then stopped.