Debating religion in the broadest and most casual of terms—is God real? What is the difference between myth and gospel?—is fun, in the liberal-arts dorm room, early Bill Maher, everyone-mostly-agrees kind of way. Someone brings up the many flood stories that exist outside of the Bible; another person mentions the pagan traditions woven into Christianity’s. A smug, Dan Brown-esque consensus is reached, and then you open another bottle of Yellowtail.
Of course, the more fraught kind of debate—with people who really mean it and for whom the stakes are quite high—is less of a good time. That’s the kind we find in the new film Heretic, which premiered here at the Toronto Film Festival on Sunday. For its characters, Heretic is no fun at all. The audience, though, might feel transported back to those pseudointellectual adolescent conversations.
Written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, Heretic is an alternately clever and silly horror-thriller that wants to have a kicky, pointed dialogue about faith vs. reason, free will vs. preordination. It maybe doesn’t arrive anywhere profound, but it has a good time laying out its thesis.
The terrific Chloe East and Sophie Thatcher play young Mormon missionaries evangelizing in a small, picturesque mountain town. East’s Sister Paxton is the more timid, naive one, while Thatcher’s Sister Barnes has a bit of flint to her, something flickering in her eyes that looks a little like doubt. Yet she also has a much higher conversion rate than Paxton, who is looking to land her first baptism. While most locals are resistant (or outright hostile) to this proselytization, the women have at least compiled a small list of the potentially interested.
Which brings them to the home of one Mr. Reed, a friendly and solicitous older chap played with dark charm by Hugh Grant. A storm is whipping up outside his quaint cottage, and he urges his visitors inside, where he promises to listen to their pitch and ask some questions. He seems like a dream candidate: affable, learned in theology but still curious. Naturally, things soon go horribly wrong.
The first part of the film is staged as somewhere between Socratic debate and lecture, as Reed prods the women about their convictions in increasingly sinister ways. The writing here is snappy, pop-literate, pleasingly twisty and ornate. Grant is having a grand old time, using that Oxford sophistication of his to thrill us to Reed’s steadily damning dissection of the world’s monotheistic beliefs. Thatcher proves a capable foil for his line of attack, while East credibly ratchets up the alarm.
The filming is crisp and satisfying too, effectively closing the walls in around Paxton and Barnes as they slowly come to the realization that they’ve wandered into a dreadful trap. The production design of Reed’s ominous home is detailed and thoughtful; it becomes the physical manifestation of a descent into hell.
Once that descent truly begins, Heretic’s wheels start rattling just a bit. Beck and Woods know they need some creepy, jumpy visuals for the trailer, and so some more outsized elements are introduced. One longs for the simpler mechanics of the film’s first half, though the three performers keep things engaging, as does the unfolding of Woods and Beck’s puzzle box script.
The film is interested in the tenets and dogma and limits of religion, yes, but more so in its practical effect on the world, particularly on women. It is a film about manipulation, and about the ceding of autonomy to a higher power. Heretic might say that such ceding is often done under duress, not of ecstatic free will—if such a thing as free will even exists.
Have we seen versions of this theme before? Sure. But Heretic presents them in some novel forms. And it is refreshing to see a horror movie—especially of the cool, meme-able A24 varietal—that has old, old social issues on its mind, rather than more zeitgeisty hot topics. Of course religion is still a mightily pertinent matter, but Heretic wants to kick at the foundation of all this, the core principle, rather than its contemporary mutations.
It’s also quite nice to see a horror movie that is so largely focused on talk. And what a talker Grant is, during this ongoing realignment of his star profile. If someone had told me back in the floppy-haired 1990s days, or the rakish early 2000s ones, that Grant would someday arrive at this kind of role, I’d have scarcely believed them. But Grant continues to prove himself an adept character actor—he may always be playing some version of Hugh Grant, but he’s been ever resourceful in bending the trope of himself into various shapes. It’s not quite transubstantiation, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a small miracle, either.
