Heretic (2024)

Young Mormon missionaries Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East) visit the home of one Mr Reed (Hugh Grant), who has shown interest in being converted.

In truth, he’s anything but a possible convert, and quickly, the young women find themselves drawn into a perverse game about faith, disbelief, one built on a very specific kind of hubris.

On paper, a contemporary, sort of topical horror movie concerning faith and the horrors of being trapped in Richard Dawkins’s cellar does not sound like a good time, but rather a source for incessant attacks of the kind of progressive smugness that never feel terribly progressive to this socialist, and won’t convince anyone to become a less shitty person. Or, even worse, like nearly two hours of preachin’ time, something that’s to be avoided quite independent of what is being preached.

So colour me most pleasantly surprised by a film that’s nuanced without hedging its bets, dares to be complex yet still have a philosophical as well as a political point of view, and is utterly unafraid to get weird to the point of the most delightful (macabre)absurdity.

Where lesser filmmakers would let things get talky, or preachy, or insufferably smug, directing duo Scott and Bryan Woods couch their film of ideas in the language of the thriller, the very typical cat-and-mouse game between a killer and his prospective victims, so well, it can be enjoyed as a nearly perfect example of its form even if you’ve no interest in the film’s exploration of belief and disbelief whatsoever.

The horror thriller elements are not just window dressing to let a lesson go down easier, yet every set piece is also part of the film’s argument with Reed, the Sisters, and its viewers, exploring metaphorical spaces to better be able to speak about its ideas. That exactly this also leads to openings for clever twists and reversions of audience expectations the film never misses to make good use of isn’t exactly an accident, but a sign of rather brilliant filmmaking.

Being the kind of viewer I am, I’m absolutely delighted by how weird and preposterous the plot is, going to wonderfully deranged places any even semi-realist horror movie would avoid like the plague out of fear of becoming ridiculous, doubling down on stranger elements because they are simply the right elements for this particular movie.

All of this is centred by some absolutely fantastic, visually imaginative, shot by shot filmmaking and three great central performances: Hugh Grant has grown into a delightful performer once he had to stop getting by on charm and is here playing a man creepy, cruel, deranged and terribly convinced of his own rightness in a very precise and specific manner, Thatcher’s captivating as she’s in every role she’s in (and how nice that it’s a really great movie this time around), and East reveals what appears at first to be a somewhat thin performance to be anything but during a final act that rises or falls with her ability to reveal hidden complexities of her character.

Not at all bad for a movie I expected to turn off after twenty minutes or so.