"Heretic": review

L to R: Sophie Thatcher as Sister Barnes, Hugh Grant as Mr. Reed, and Chloe East as Sister Paxton

[WARNING: vague spoilers.]

"Heretic" is a 2024 horror film by quirkily independent company A24. It's directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, and it stars that most unlikely of horror villains, Hugh Grant, perhaps best known for his stammering, 90s-era romantic comedies as well as for his 1995 in-car indiscretions with ugly prostitute Divine Brown while he was dating the gorgeous Elizabeth Hurley. (Was Hurley that much of a bitch?) Grant's co-stars, Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East, play two hapless Mormon girls. 

The movie is about many things, especially the one dead horse that Hollywood loves to beat: religion itself. Imagine a nearly two-hour version of a debate you may have had with a door-to-door Christian. This happened to me once, long ago, when I was alone in the parents' house, and a Korean Jehovah's Witness came up to make his case. We stood outside on the front stoop, in the cold, since I was in no mood to let the man in, and I recall him mentioning how "God is a God of order," to which I argued for the necessity of chaos and randomness and disorder if anything new is ever to occur. The guy left soon after.

The movie's premise is a simple one: two young Mormon missionaries, 20-year-old Sister Barnes (Thatcher) and 19-year-old Sister Paxton (East), are casing their designated area to proselytize. They have heard that a Mr. Reed (Grant), who lives in a slightly secluded house, has expressed an interest in learning more about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. As the weather begins to turn ugly, the girls lock their bikes at Mr. Reed's front gate and knock on his door in the rain. Mr. Reed invites the girls in, and if you've watched horror movies before, you can guess that the front door is now locked, and the two girls are essentially flies who have landed in the spider's web.

While that's the basic premise of the plot—and it's fairly predictable on that level—the devil is, as they say, in the details. "Heretic" falls into that subgenre of horror movies in which the protagonists seal their own fate simply by being too polite (cf. "Speak No Evil"). Mr. Reed, it seems, has an agenda. He reassures the girls that his wife is baking a blueberry pie but is shy about meeting the girls. (The girls had said they couldn't come in if no woman was present.) He is also no babe in the woods when it comes to religion, and much of the movie is a long dialogue about the origins of religious figures like Jesus and the purpose of religion in general. The revelation of what the seemingly anti-religious Mr. Reed calls "the one true religion" is not much of a revelation; the Matrix movies, for all their flaws, actually did it better, and with the same revelation. At the same time that Mr. Reed is revealing how knowledgeable he is about religion, the girls are feeling a dawning sense of horror as they realize that Reed is delaying them as well as leading them more deeply into his house, where there is no wife in the kitchen, but there is a blueberry pie that plays a rather interesting role in the film's final third.

I wanted to like this movie more given that the dialogue is, mostly, right up my alley thanks to my grad work in religious studies. But especially by the end, I couldn't shake the feeling that the dialogue—all of that religion-talk—was beside the point. The real point was the exploration of one man's insanity as ultimately expressed through the typical horror-movie tropes of dark, labyrinthine basements, screaming women, a metal-meshed house designed to block cell-phone signals, dungeons, zombie-like women in cerements, stabbings, slashings, and a "final girl." There was a missed chance to go for quietly evil instead of openly predatory.

Too much of the movie passes beyond the realm of plausibility. How did Reed amass so many caged women without anyone ever noticing? Why would candles be lit everywhere inside the labyrinthine basement (and how much maintenance does that require?)? How was Reed able to create a house that so specifically fit his evil wants and needs?

Not to say the movie had no good points: Grant's and the young ladies' acting is spot-on, and there are true moments of tension as well as a couple of silly jump scares. The house, for all of its implausible features, is a character unto itself and would make for a great, spooky amusement-park attraction. The ongoing debate about religion is superficially fascinating as a review of things Joseph Campbell had written about decades ago—Isis and Horus and Mithra and Krishna. Even Buddhism gets a one-and-done mention.

But by the end, "Heretic" becomes another typical horror movie, devolving into violence and relying on a screamingly obvious "Chekhov's gun" move to bring us most of the way to the film's ambiguous conclusion—a conclusion that leaves us to wonder whether one of the main characters does, in fact, make it out alive. I suspect not: she had mentioned, earlier in the movie, how she hoped to come back as a butterfly after dying, landing on the hands of her loved ones to show them she was still around. When this character sees an actual butterfly on her hand, then a moment later sees nothing on her hand, the evidence tilts pretty clearly toward the idea that she is, in fact, dying or dead. Add to this the fact that the storm that began right as the girls were entering Mr. Reed's house had morphed from rain to snow over the course of the night, meaning butterflies would be unlikely to show up when there's snow on the ground. There are, in reality, a few butterfly species that can appear after snowstorms, but this still doesn't explain the sudden disappearance of the butterfly in question.

The butterfly, as a Christian symbol, is often used to represent resurrection (pupa/chrysalis of death followed by the butterfly of new life), which is a concept that comes up several times in the film, both in dialogue and as literal visuals (of apparently dead people apparently coming back to life). Symbols are, of course, multivalent, so the film's ending can be interpreted in different ways. I've seen online theories claiming that this character is still on the floor of Reed's basement, bleeding out from a stab to the gut, experiencing the wild visions the brain generates as it's dying (which is another topic that one character talks about—the visions of a dying brain). Others online claim the butterfly symbolizes another one of the dead characters, but this makes little sense given how the first character had described what she wanted for herself. The simulation hypothesis gets a mention around the middle of the film, and it's possible to read the entire movie as one big simulation. This is to tied a moment in the discussion/debate when Reed mentions the Chinese philosopher (Chuang-tzu) who speculated on whether he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was a man. In Reed's view, it could be that dreams and simulations are close cousins.

Some critics were turned off by the film's talkiness, but I thought that this was one of its greatest merits, almost like a Socratic dialogue come to life, even if all of the talk was merely a superficial cover for the primitively predatory subtext. And for you Freud fans who might have come away from the film thinking that no sex ever happened, consider that Reed, when he finally uses his knife, has the goal of penetrating the two girls.

In conclusion, "Heretic" is more fun to talk about than to watch, and most of the talk will naturally center on the movie's final few minutes. Whether or not such a movie is your idea of a fun time is up to you. Are you into epistemology and the study of doxastic praxis? If yes, this movie is definitely for you. For me, I found the discussions about religion to be rehashed, 101-level digs at a social phenomenon that has endured for millennia—an interesting but fundamentally unserious exchange. But your own mileage may vary. Perhaps the best aspect of the movie is how directors Beck and Woods take all the cutesy mannerisms of 90s-era Hugh Grant and turn them into something first subtly then plainly horrifying. For all of its flaws and implausibilities, "Heretic" is nothing if not mildly entertaining. Watch at your own risk.

ADDENDUM: The Cinema Therapy guys—both Mormons—give their review. The guys also have a longer video in which they sit down with the directors.