Heretic (2024)

**/****
starring Hugh Grant, Sophie Thatcher, Chloe East
written and directed by Scott Beck & Bryan Woods

by Walter Chaw Heretic‘s premise is childish wish-fulfillment, an exercise in mental cruelty in which a medium-schooled skeptic challenges a pair of comely young missionaries, hoisting them on their own insinuating, syllogistic petard. And who better to function as audience avatar than Hugh Grant? Rather, this elderly iteration of Grant, crusted over with a shell of sociopathic nastiness, like his brittle accent made manifest in flesh and wool cardigan? Get ’em, you ossified piece of British shit! Grant plays Mr. Reed, a cozy hermit secreted smugly in his richly-appointed hobbit hole who invites Sister Paxton (Chloe East) and Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) in from a God-is-wroth thunderstorm to indulge their desire to share with him the Good News courtesy of the Church of Latter-day Saints. He has a fire roaring, a blueberry pie in the oven, and, allegedly, a shy wife cowering in a back bedroom, so the girls aren’t in a strange man’s home alone with the strange man. The Mission wouldn’t allow that, you see, but Mr. Reed is reassuring. The amiable chatting soon turns to wicked jousting, and the jousting becomes inappropriate and uncomfortable. When Barnes and Paxton try to leave, they find that the front door is locked and their only option is the Stockton prize of lady or tiger. That is, they are offered the choice of two doors–one marked “BELIEVE,” the other “DISBELIEVE”–as their only possibility of escape from his unctuous, patronizing company. Behind one is the back entrance to the house. Behind the other? Tiger or, rather, Tyger, of the “here there be” variety.

It’s every thoughtful person’s perverse little fantasy for a while, isn’t it? This intellectual/spiritual humiliation of blank-eyed cultists learning tribalism through your rejection of them. But the reason you want to humiliate the churchies is because you’re afraid of their certainty. Not that they’re right, but that they’re fucking nuts. Then again, so are you, and so am I. And what a film Heretic might have been had it proceeded along this course. What if Mr. Reed were a natty, Londonite Bart “God’s Problem” Ehrman? A true scholar who had done his homework over the course of painstaking decades and come to these young women with a series of devastating observations and pointed rejoinders? Alas, writer-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods give as much real thought to this exercise as they did to A Quiet Place, which is to say: not much.

For Heretic, they throw out the usual parallel mythology stuff using not one set of elaborate visual aids, but two. They lean heavily on Grant’s terrifying self-assurance for the rest. This is kid’s stuff–a fundie zombie’s first “hey, wait a minute” revelations when they hit junior high and accidentally read a book they weren’t supposed to, or make a friend of a different faith who isn’t the Devil. I want to confirm at this point that I have also seen and enjoyed Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Sleuth, which made the absolute, most delicious most of its house-as-puzzle-box-cum-labyrinth production design. I see what you’re doing here, in other words. Try again. Heretic is “Atheism for Dummies” written by people who either aren’t atheists or haven’t given it much thought, making them either Evangelical wolves in sheep’s clothing or no better than any of the other unquestioning, radicalized cultists. It’s possible that’s the point. It’s possible Beck and Woods wanted to portray Mr. Reed as a pseudo-intellectual bully cribbing from the forewords of Christopher Hitchens books in order to steamroll teen missionaries even less well-read than him. If so, is Heretic a Trojan Horse for Christianity, or is it the Disney version of Martyrs? Either way, it seems the real villain is the desire for self-determination in a pre-destined universe.

Honestly, I doubt Heretic is smart enough to have such intention. It’s an object lesson in the dangerous fallacy of pillarisation fused with Zach Cregger’s Barbarian; any philosophy is to provide a life-support system for a sudden, left genre turn reliant on dedicated character work in the service of no revelation worthy of excavation. I appreciated a concession near the end that all that faith requires is faith and that attempts to undermine it with reason are, by the very nature of faith, doomed to failure. I liked, too, the corollary to this line of thinking that says the use of reason to defeat faith is an act of arrogance and narcissism on the part of the would-be voice of logic and measurable truth. When it’s revealed that Mr. Reed is more Sadean than agnostic, more Cenobite than scholar, all the delicious possibilities of a film dedicated to defining “heresy” in this of all realities is tossed out the window in favour of a more troubling (because it’s so predictable) assignation of good and evil. I didn’t know going in that Beck and Woods had written the first A Quiet Place, but it makes sense. Both it and Heretic play the same shell game with a conservative worldview. I don’t care if the filmmakers believe in God, but I guess I do care that they believe they’re fooling anyone. All the shells are empty. I’ve seen this trick before.