Score: 4 / 5
A surprising and welcome new energy from Scott Beck and Bryan Woods pervades the thick atmosphere of Heretic. The filmmaking duo are still trying to make a name for themselves, perhaps partly due to the niche attraction fans have to their material. After all, conceiving and writing A Quiet Place launched them to the major studios, but then their directorial features Haunt and 65 were perhaps a little too bonkers for all but the cult parts of horror fandom. The Boogeyman was a lot of fun, but like all Stephen King adaptations, it too has a certain appeal (or lack of) in the community. They have great ideas and for the most part realize them in grim, graphic ways.
Heretic is no less grim, to be sure, and its haunted grotesquerie seems determined to burn its way into your memory. But the majority of horrors depicted here are didactic. Spiritual, even. The first half (roughly; I wasn't paying attention to time) is a Hitchcockian Socratic dialogue, pitting two young Mormon missionaries against the older man who invites them into his home. It's clear we're not to trust this man, but the film's internal logic forces us to accept their choice to cross his domicile's threshold. He's kindly, it's storming, and his house is cozy and quaint in that elderly way, with wafts of blueberry pie wafting into the sitting room from the kitchen. The reclusive man assures the young ladies that his wife is just in the other room, so no impropriety shall occur as they discuss the tenets of faith with him.
There have been a flurry of horror films lately that challenge the established format of home invasion thrillers and abduction-and-escape scenarios, especially Barbarian and Don't Breathe, which both seem to be referenced consciously here. But the focus is less on when Mr. Reed (played by a disarming and urgently creepy Hugh Grant in a role that should earn him laurels) will pounce on these young ladies than it is on how he will do so. His conversation is a bit too prepared, a bit too ritualized, for him to be inventing it off the cuff. You all but expect him to draw a screen, turn on a projector, and start explaining his slides. In fact, he brings out several versions of the Monopoly board game to illustrate his slightly belabored point about the structural similarities and mere cosmetic differences between the monotheistic religions. You get the feeling he's done this before.
But the girls are not quite ubiquitous. Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) is a bit brassier, more confident and daring to be more assertive in the face of Mr. Reed's thinly veiled accusations and implications; Sister Paxton (Chloe East) is more innocent and timid, eager to be the nice, sweet face of her church at the cost of her own agency. This film might pair nicely with Barbarian or Speak No Evil if you want to spend a few hours sweating over anxious politeness and the tense observance of social etiquette in violent situations. And for most of its runtime, that's what Heretic does best: remind us of the terrifying power of religion (far more than individual belief) to construct our reality and control our lives. It's not necessarily about a religious zealot who becomes a villainous monster -- though Mr. Reed is not as feeble as he appears, and when blood is spilled, it accompanies a few revelations about his modus operandi and motivations that are deeply troubling if unexpectedly baffling -- but more about a prophet of sorts seeking to challenge the faithful to reason their way through their own beliefs.
As such, the film is as satisfying as it is entertaining, a tense exercise in curt dialogue and admirable acting in a chamber piece of increasingly Gothic aesthetic. Once Mr. Reed's preachiness reaches its climax, and his ruse revealed to be the spider's web it is, the girls are free to leave, but they must do so while playing his bizarre game, leading them through a purgatory of his making. I expected this film, once it pulled this curtain back, to go full-tilt into a certain subgenre exemplified by Beck and Woods's previous features and their roller coaster vibes. It does not, which makes the second half of the film feel more than a bit slapdash. Despite their naivete or foolishness in trusting Mr. Reed that his wife was in the other room -- she wasn't, of course, which underlines his point about believing that God is there simply because kindly old men told you he was -- the girls fight paralysis as they descend into a waking nightmare.
Which is literal, because the path out of the house (according to Mr. Reed) is through his dank, dark cellar. Again the references pile up, and when they discover they're not alone in his cellar, things really go awry. There is a strange focus on religious theatricality here, and on some frankly unnecessarily gross practical effects, and the combo almost took me out of the movie entirely. Not because it's "bad" by any dubious attempt at evaluation, but because it's so different from the cerebral themes and tones already established in the first half. Think of the first Saw film and the shocking brevity of actual onscreen violence. Heck, this movie has tonal shifts like we might see if The Silence of the Lambs and Silence had Mormon progeny.
Whether or not the full movie works for you, it's a daring bit of novelty from its directorial team as much as it is from its leading man. Grant is clearly having fun with the role, and he and his co-stars dance their way through with determined aplomb. The set is deceptively simple and captured with compelling curiosity by cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung (Wonka, Uncharted, Hotel Artemis, Last Night in Soho, The Current War, It, Boulevard, and a host of Park Chan-wook films), who guides us through the labyrinthine weirdness with such kinetic fluidity that despite feeling claustrophobic we also are drawn to severe facial close-ups to make sense of it all.
Perhaps the greatest success of this film is less in its challenging of religion -- or of belief, though this is definitely not a film about not believing something -- and more in its frank advocacy of challenging what you yourself believe as a practice or discipline meant to make your belief better. This is an apologetics masterclass in working your way through history and philosophy, through social mores and dogmatic repression, daring you not just to think about religion (it's a fascinating choice to center on Mormons, just as it is fascinating that Mr. Reed only seems to want to draw women into his den) but to think about how your approach to reality -- to life -- can and should be changed. Plato's cave, the butterfly dream, near-death visions of the afterlife, even the simulation hypothesis are all explicitly brought into the film's logic, offering plenty of fodder for a late-night discussion with your friends after the credits begin to roll.
