Heretic

dirs: Scott Beck and Bryan Woods

2024

It’s been a good year for horror. I often find that the worse life outside of cinemas gets, the better the horror films that we eventually see become.

It’s a thin gruel of consolation, I’ll admit. It’s almost callous in its disregard for all the misery ongoing for many at the moment, and for even more people any minute now.

But that’s why we watch movies, even horror movies. It’s not just for escape – it can be time spent in a world constructed to make a certain amount of sense, when sense is profoundly lacking all around us.

And, oh, Hugh Grant in his baddie phase… yes please. I think he only plays monsters now, and we’re all the better for it.

For the longest time Heretic chugs along at a certain pace, and we are not sure if Grant’s character of Mr Reed is just an arsehole or if he’s a monstrous arsehole.

That is exactly as it should be. I don’t think anyone looks at the poster for this flick, with Grant in all his square-glassed, weathered glory, with any doubt as to if he’s playing a monster or not, but that’s just a story we tell ourselves based on appearances.

I’m starting to think he’s a baddie in real life too: He really, really seems to be enjoying it. And when hobbies and work crossover, well, they’re paying you for doing what you love.

You might think that, given that the protagonists are Mormons, that this flick exists as a trenchant criticism of that particularly cultish offshoot of Christianity. I don’t think it does.

At film’s beginning, the picture we get of Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East) is that they’re naïve kids bothering people because they have to for their ludicrous faith, the flick doesn’t portray their ignorance / naivety in a harsh light. They approach people or knock on their doors, say their script but then immediately retreat when people show no interest or hostility. And they’re always polite about it, even when the people around them are insulting or vicious.

They are also not completely naïve, in that they have a certain amount self-preservation instilled in them, believing they know which situations to avoid and how best to do that.

Their fatal flaw, though, as is a common thread in certain horror flicks, like this, Speak No Evil (the original more so than the remake), and looking a bit further back, Michael Haneke’s diabolical Funny Games, is their politeness.

In the face of a genteel, ever so polite British older man, they are practically helpless despite their protestations and despite the fact that a stiff elbow to the chest would probably cripple the old fuck.

Welcomed into his strange home, the missionaries start on script, relating the joys and the wonders of being a part of the Church of Latter Day Saints, and Mr Reed at least initially feigns ignorance. And then of course he travels all the way to the “well, actually”, and gives them plenty of indications that he is more than aware of the underpinnings of the Mormon faith, clearly having read the Book of Mormon himself.

He starts mentioning the contradictions, or the less savoury / believable aspects of the faith, like the divinely inspired polygamy that was then divinely undone through revelation when the propensity for polygamy made them shunned pariahs even amongst the other intolerant Christian sects.

Sister Barnes has the ready response that’s been drilled into them by their elder, but she delivers it in a way that shows she barely believes it as a credible comeback.

I should mention that both girls only enter the home based on the assurance that Mr Reed’s wife is just out of sight, baking a blueberry pie. Otherwise they wouldn’t be allowed by the precepts of their faith to be in some random guy’s home, no matter how urbane and considerate he might be.

A large slab of the film is Mr Reed lecturing the girls, and the girls either reacting or not reacting, but looking increasingly stressed. They feel like there’s something obviously weird going on, but they can’t work out what, and each time they politely try to extricate themselves, he politely offers up regrettable obstacles or otherwise unbelievable reasons as to why they shouldn’t leave just yet, or that the wife is just out of sight and will be with them shortly.

And the pie is always almost ready. I mean, they can practically smell it.

It’s a good long while before they realise they have put themselves willingly inside a trap constructed by someone who has put a lot of work and more importantly grudge work into his thoughts about religion, and by God is he going to make sure they listen to him.

Yes, yes, we have all heard the arguments from people who think they’re the next Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins, but nothing says “I am so much smarter than you” than pointing out that someone else’s beliefs are stupid, because they’re based on faith, but all my thoughts and opinions are true and genius level, well, because I said so.

There is a long arse lecture in the middle of the flick, before everything goes berserk, which has our very helpful Mr Reed talk at length, with lots of visual aids, about the perils of iteration.

He also helpfully plays a vinyl record for the benefit of the missionaries, being the song The Air that I Breathe by The Hollies. Ah, lovely song, but I don’t need to listen to Golden Oldies radio right now.

It made me laugh, because he’s trying to convince them that that’s the original, and decades later Radiohead ripped them off by using the same chord progression in their massive hit Creep, which in turn was ripped off by Lana Del Rey for Get Free.

But when he’s talking about music from sixty years ago, or thirty years ago, or ten years ago, what the fuck does that mean to a pair of Mormon girls, who aren’t that pop culturally savvy in the first place?

Nothing! Your examples are terrible, old man. He helpfully also shows the original game The Landlord Game, which was eventually ripped off for Monopoly, which made its ripper-offer a squillionaire, and the original creator died in penury.

And what is his ultimate point? What is he trying to convince the girls of? Well, he’s trying to convince them that all religions are just copies, iterations, of earlier religions, all stemming not from the One True Religion, but from earlier and earlier myths.

He has done this before, you have to think, but to what end?

The girls, still freaked out, are not beaten down. Sister Barnes, after having maintained the veneer of politeness or deference longer than has proved beneficial to both parties, lets loose with relevant and well thought out responses that reveal the shallowness of his thinking, which seems as dogmatic as any religious fanatic would make.

And then, trapped, like rats in a maze, he gives them a seeming choice, through a door marked ‘belief’, and another called ‘disbelief’, through which they can achieve their freedom.

But of course this has only been a prelude to something much darker and much uglier.

This is mostly a three-hander, and all three-hands do sterling work. Of course Hugh Grant gets to exposit and pontificate the most, he is a man, after all, and of course in Mormonism one should always defer to the loudest man in the room, and his performance is riveting and poisonous in ways that are very uncomfortable. He embodies the cold certainty of a true believer, who only very late in the film reveals what he truly believes in, which is his untrammelled right to do whatever the fuck he wants.

The missionaries, as you would imagine, have the harder roles. Both do phenomenal work, especially as they upend our expectations of who is the more forthright, or assertive, and who will actually figure out a way to block this wrinkly monster from his deepest desires.

The film takes a turn, one that might not work for a percentage of the audience. It then takes a couple more turns, in which it could lose the rest of the audience along the way. It’s not so much in the revelation of just how terrible Mr Reed is, the scale of his awfulness, but some of the plot – narrative requirements that he seems to require in order to do that which he needs, which is really to break people before he does something worse to them.

I can’t say that most audiences would be able to go along with where the story ends up, but it mostly worked for me, and that’s solely on the strength of the performances of the three leads, less so on the quality of the “arguments”, which don’t ultimately don’t mean shit.

Topher Grace has a very small role, and looks almost unrecognisable as a church elder who may or may not play a role in ‘saving’ the sisters. He is very funny to me. And, if you remember The Shining, it really looks like he’s going to be the Scatman Cruthers character who looks like he’s going to save the day and bites the big one as a shocking jump scare instead. I’m not saying that’s what happens to the elder here, because that would be an appalling spoiler, but I think that’s what we’re meant to think, and the way it’s resolved is particularly funny and appropriate, given the people involved.

It’s a bit funny to me that the two female leads are former members of the LDS church themselves, though nothing they do here would seem to take to task their former bonkers religion (I say that in the spirit that all religious beliefs are bonkers to those that don’t follow them, no matter how magical the underwear promises to be.” Still, there must be something cathartic for them in all this madness.

As for why Hugh Grant is taking such delicious delight in these roles these days, well, I think he’s just trying to tell us who he is, and not what we wish we could hold onto from the Four Weddings, Notting Hill, or About a Boy days. He’s telling us he’s an absolute bounder, and we should believe him.

8 times Hugh Grant terrorising Paddington was the first red flag out of 10

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“I promise you, the last thing I wanted to do was find the one true religion - but unfortunately, I did.” – cool, but I don’t remember asking, bro - Heretic