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.

The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020)

Snow Hollow, a small mountain community in Utah, is struck by a series of incredibly violent killings. With the ripped apart state of the victims, it isn’t even clear at first if these are animal attacks or products of a really rather mad killer. Given these facts, the wolf-like descriptions coming from witnesses, and the mix of animal ferocity and cleverness in the murders, one might even think the killer is some kind of werewolf.

The local police is ill prepared for this sort of case, and help isn’t even coming once they ask for it. Nominally, the little police department is commanded by Sheriff Hadley (Robert Forster), but the man is ailing in body, mind, and spirit, so the actual work falls on the shoulders of Hadley’s son, John Marshall (Jim Cummings). John, a man barely keeping dry via a twelve step program, fighting against violent urges, a feeling of rage against himself and the world, and all manner of self-destructive behaviour while also attempting to keep the peace with his ex-wife (Rachel Day) and rebuild the cracked relationship with his daughter Jenna (Chloe East), is not actually in any state to withstand the mounting pressures of the investigation. As the number of bodies rises and very few clues that would make any logical sense turn up, he breaks down increasingly. Things aren’t helped by the fact that apart from John, there’s really only one member of the police force qualified for more than writing parking tickets, Julia Robson (Rikki Lindhome). Actually, Julia is rather more qualified and mentally better prepared for the case than John himself, only, she isn’t related to the Sheriff, and woman.

The first time I tried watching Jim Cummings’s The Wolf of Snow Hollow I bounced of it quickly and forcefully. Today, I’d call it one of the best movies of the last ten years or so (at least), so clearly, I can be a bit of a fool sometimes. Of course, the film’s very dry sense of humour, its slow and careful characterisation and its very particular ideas of what can and can not be called a horror movie are the sort of thing not everyone will tune into even on repeated tries, which is neither a failure of the movie nor one of any given viewer.

If and when one starts to get the movie’s – or really Cummings’s given that he directed, wrote and plays the lead – perspective, one begins encountering a film whose horrors are found in more than just its handful of gory corpses and its tale of a werewolf (or is it a serial killer?) murder series taking place in a small town. Rather, the film’s heart lies in its treatment of John’s struggles, a downward spiral he, like many of us with psychological troubles, can see and experience but feels helpless to break free from even though there is help for him to be had, and which eventually leads in a very traditionally male way to a place of violence that can end up set against himself or against others. The film finds moments of humour in John’s increasing self-destructiveness, but it’s never making fun of the psychological struggles and failures themselves. These, it treats with surprising compassion, never excusing some of the shittiness John gets up to, but treating it with a degree of delicacy and sadness you wouldn’t exactly expect in a werewolf movie. Of course there are clear parallels between John and his behaviour and the wolf, both partaking in the same male coded propensity for violence, just not ending up in the same place, exactly. Since the film treats this aspect subtly, it makes a rather more interesting, or really, more personal argument about men and violence than you usually get in this sort of thing. It also suggests a way to betterment for at least one of its violent men.

Also sad and very subtle is the portrayal of the relationship between John and his father. There’s a well-observed understanding of difficult family relations and the pain that’s part of love under these circumstances on display that’s rare and unexpected in any medium. That one half of the father/son duo is portrayed by Robert Forster shortly before his death adds even more poignancy.

Cummings is just as adept at the larger scale of portraying a community under pressure as he is at the micro-scale of family relationships and personal breakdowns. Snow Hollow quickly feels like a real place with real, if slightly grotesque, people, a place that follows recognizable rules of social connections, that feels lived in and believable. It also feels like a physical space, snow and darkness and blood taking on extra weight by it.

That The Wolf of Snow Hollow’s moments of suspense and gore are also rather excellent feels nearly beside the point in this context.