There is a pivotal moment about half an hour into the new horror movie Heretic in which the sinister Mr. Reed, played in a rare heel turn by Hugh Grant, offers a pair of female Mormon missionaries a choice. Behind him lie two doors, one marked “Belief,” the other marked “Disbelief.” At least one of them, he claims, will lead them to the exit of his fortified home, but he insists they answer him honestly: do they truly believe in the higher power they’re peddling door to door, despite all evidence to the contrary, or do they suspect that mankind is all alone in the universe, with all the insignificance that entails? The young women, understandably, are at a loss; obviously, their primary goal is to escape this madman’s lair, but he’s talked them in so many circles that they don’t know what he wants to hear– or, for that matter, what they do believe.
Reviewing Heretic, I find myself faced with a similar dilemma. I’m writing this, you see, on Halloween, the morning after the Boston preview screening of Heretic. By the time you read it, however, you’ll have experienced an even scarier day: Election Tuesday, 2024. Given the nature and tone of the film, I strongly suspect how I feel about it in the long term will be dictated by the results of that election. The question, then: do I write my review now, and risk dramatically reassessing by the time it actually opens, or do I wait until after next Tuesday, at which point my opinion might be colored by myriad factors unrelated to the film itself? Which door do I pick?
Let’s start with the basics of the film, anyway, as those are unlikely to change in the interim. The missionaries are Sister Paxton and Sister Barnes, played with wide-eyed charm by Chloe East and Sophie Thatcher. Their mission brings them to the door of Mr. Reed just as a brutal snowstorm hits; he affably welcomes them in, and tells them that his wife has a pie in the oven. Even if you haven’t seen the trailer, it should come as no surprise that there is neither a pie nor a Mrs. Reed.
What Mr. Reed has to offer instead is conversation– and lots of it– first interrogating the girls about the various tenets of the Latter Day Saints, then expounding upon his own theories of comparative theology. As the shape of the film became clear, I began to worry; movies this long with this much talk are tough to pull off, and writer-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, best known for penning the screenplay to A Quiet Place (on which my thoughts are a matter of public record), aren’t exactly Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory. Yet, as the film unspooled, I found myself pleasantly surprised at how lively and fun it all is. It’s dumb-smart, but it knows it’s dumb-smart, and it cannily plays its twists at all the right intervals to keep you on your toes, evoking the nutty thrills of Barbarian far more effectively than the more calculated Strange Darling. It’s gutter-Sleuth, which to me is as winning a formula as can be.
A three-hander like this lives and dies by the strength of its three hands, and Beck and Woods’ greatest strength here is in their casting of their leads. East is every bit as winning here as in her scene-stealing performance as Sammy’s Jesus-loving (really loving) girlfriend in The Fabelmans; in her goofy naivete, she reminded me of Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams in Dick, had they encountered an evil more immediately threatening than G. Gordon Liddy. Thatcher is maybe even better, turning in every bit the incoming-movie-star performance as Anya Taylor-Joy in The Witch. Thatcher bears a more than passing resemblance to Taylor-Joy in her wan, horror-movie-ready countenance, but with a tougher, spikier edge. As a screen presence, she has it, and I’m putting in writing now that she’s going to be everywhere within a couple years’ time.
But the film’s smartest instinct is in its deployment of Hugh Grant. It’s stuntcasting, of course– sort of a male equivalent of the so-called “hagsploitation” films of the ‘60s– but it’s really good stuntcasting. There are any number of actors who could have played Mr. Reed; Christoph Waltz probably could have done a great job with the character, and likely would have delivered a performance not dissimilar to Grant’s. But what makes Hugh Grant so great here is that he’s Hugh Grant. He weaponizes all of those Hugh Grantisms– the bashful half-smile, that floppy-haired stammer– which made him the thinking gal’s hunk of the ‘90s, triggering the rom-com synapses of your brain to fall for him even as you know there is a zero percent chance he’s not playing a psychopath. His performance, in turn, speaks to the savvy of Beck and Woods; that they would cast Hugh Grant in this role signals a certain devilish playfulness, communicating that we’re not just watching another dour Saw knockoff. Hugh Grant is cast against type, but he’s playing to type, and that dissonance makes all the difference.
Of course, that’s not the only type Hugh Grant is playing. The film’s true game comes into focus once Sisters Paxton and Barnes are trapped in Mr. Reed’s lair (it shouldn’t come as a spoiler to reveal that their chosen door does not, in fact, lead to an exit). As Sister Paxton panics, Sister Barnes reasons that their only hope is to distract him by playing to his love of pontification. Mr. Reed is, for lack of a better term, a Debate Bro, that pernicious breed of just-asking-questions toxic male which has proliferated online over the past decade or so; think the followers of Richard Dawkins, or that one right-wing douchebag in the “Change My Mind” meme (I can’t remember his name, and you shouldn’t be able to either). He delights in talking circles around his young captives, but while he’s certainly eloquent and entertaining, they soon begin to suspect that his rhetoric is like his blueberry pie: all aroma, no pastry.
Perhaps now you can see my hesitancy in reviewing this film before knowing the results of the election. Heretic is most certainly a horror film of its moment, just as much as Get Out was seven years ago– about a particularly insidious form of discourse which has infected our nation’s male youth via podcasts and social media. What you know, and I at this moment do not, is whether it will go down as the final film of the Trump era (of which, make no mistake, the Biden era will go down as a chapter) or the first of its terrifying next stage. To solve this dilemma, I’m going to do what Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton could not: punt. I am going to close my computer today, in October, while this uncertainty hangs in the air. At the start of the next paragraph, I will rejoin you in the future, at which point I will hopefully be able to come to a more definite conclusion.
Fuck.
I’m going to be honest with you: I had my hand on the knob of the “Believer” door. For all the cynicism I’ve built up over the past eight years, I truly did not expect to have to grapple with this reality, but here we are. There’s a lot we’re going to have to do, all of us, to figure out how to navigate and survive the next four years (or, optimistically, perhaps less; this Onion article will be 12 years old at the time of inauguration). In the meantime, I am tasked with answering a question literally no one is asking: what does this mean for the 2024 horror movie Heretic?
Heretic is a good little movie. It is not, by my reckoning, a great movie– it spins its wheels a bit in the third act, and the ultimate reveal of Mr. Reed’s design is inevitably something of a letdown– but it paces its twists and turns well, and the talent involved sells the hell out of it (I would also be remiss if I did not note that it contains a brief scene in which Hugh Grant imitates Jar Jar Binks, which is something I don’t believe any other film can claim). Taken in a vacuum, I would recommend Heretic as a devilishly entertaining, lightly tongue-in-cheek thriller. But, of course, we don’t watch movies in a vacuum; we watch them in the context of our world, and the world in which you will watch Heretic is more broken– more visibly broken, anyway– than the one I saw it in. I don’t know whether you’ll find it as “fun” as I did, now that we know the extent to which Mr. Reed’s brand of dipshitty discourse has infected a generation of too-online young men. But there is, perhaps, catharsis to be found as our heroines learn to best him at his own game, and the holes which begin to show through his flashy intellect. As the scrappy Sister Barnes says, “We might not be a physical threat, but we can be an intellectual one.” Like Paxton and Barnes, we have a mission, and as long as we don’t cede to the Mr. Reeds of the world, I’m confident we will, eventually, find our way out of their basement.
Heretic
2024
dir. Scott Beck & Bryan Woods
110 min.
Opens Friday, 11/8 @ Coolidge Corner Theatre, Somerville Theatre, Kendall Square Cinema, and assorted multiplexes
