Heretic (2024) - Hugh Grant expertly shepherds faulty religious horror
Credit: allocine.fr
Only Hugh Grant can portray two sides of devilishly charming and get away with it. In Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’ Heretic, the floppy hair, billowing shirts and hesitant nature typecast of Notting Hill, Four Weddings and a Funeral, and Sense and Sensibility are abruptly dropped for a more traditional depiction of devilish, as Grant welcomes two Mormon missionaries to his home to devastating consequences.
There is a lot to like here, particularly for those who are currently relishing Grant’s ‘new villain era’ – or, simply, the fact that he can play something other than bamboozled British heartthrob. But even Phoenix Buchanan (the flamboyant antagonist in Paddington 2) and Forge Fitzwilliam (the rogue con artist of Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Amongst Thieves) do not compare to Mr Reed on the scale of evil. He is manipulative, twisted, devoid of any redeemable qualities – and Grant plays him expertly. As his mentees-turned-prisoners there are the confident, slightly troubled Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and the nervous and easily convinced Sister Paxton (Chloe East), who open the film discussing condom advertisement practices and pornography. This is a thread that is to follow them throughout – are Mormons supposed to talk about these things? How religious are they, really? No doubt Mr Reed is ready to pry on this very same question. Flashes of the Sisters’ pasts permeate their reactions to the quickly spiralling situation and their attitude towards their captor – a near death experience, a particular relationship to family members. Themes of sexuality and doubt are expertly introduced. Just enough is given to be kept on one’s toes, and East and Thatcher hit all the right notes of hesitation, fear, and uncertainty – how do they act with Reed? Which door do they pick? While Paxton is eager to please, Barnes chooses to play Reed at his own game, making for a veritable cocktail of possible avenues Heretic could choose to go down. The first act truly is edge-of-the-seat material.
Where it falls short, however, is in its unwillingness to see its original concept through to the end. Its first act is tense, chilling, as Mr Reed sits Paxton and Barnes down after assuring them his wife is home and baking blueberry pie, and questions them about their faith. Revealing himself a religion connoisseur – confirmed by the tabbed Book of Mormon he proudly shows them – Reed grows progressively more intrusive, much to Paxton and Barnes’ discomfort. At this stage, Heretic may be considered a thriller, and an excellent one at that, Reed’s intellectual jabbing into his subjects’ psyches akin to Hannibal Lecter’s in The Silence of the Lambs. It is where horror is introduced that all suspense is lost, a common trope of traditional films, to put it bluntly, doing the film dirty. From there, all of Heretic’s missed potential becomes scarily apparent – from the two-door choice, which could have led to many more ‘games’ based on the question of faith, through to the labyrinthine nature of Reed’s house, deployed in the trailer, mirrored in Chung Chung-hoon’s cinematography, but criminally underused in the overall plot. The surface of this Blair Witch Project-esque maze is only just scratched at the very end when, of course, it is too late. What also starts to lose its way as the plot thickens – or rather, thins – is Reed’s actual goal: his original intentions are clear, but as events start to get out of hand, more questions rather than answers are introduced, making for a very shaky finale in which the entire message of Heretic inevitably strays from its path.