Heretic: Hugh Grant uses his charming persona to draw blood in this creepy theological horror
Two young Mormon missionaries find themselves entrapped by a villainous Hugh Grant in a gimmicky, zeitgeist-surfing horror that finds its chills in religious debate.
- Reviewed from the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival.
Give Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’ Heretic credit: it’s surely the first movie to thread the conceptual needle between our anxious, post-millennial epistemology and the enduring power-pop perfection of the English band the Hollies.
Having stealthily entrapped a pair of junior door-to-door Mormons behind locked doors in his secluded country estate – a predatory moths-to-the-light routine he’s evidently perfected over the years – tweedy psychopath Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant) treats his prisoners to a song: the Hollies’ 1974 classic ‘The Air That I Breathe.’ Given the context of what would seem to be a life-or-death-debate over the existence (or not) of God – with Mr. Reed making the case for the prosecution – the song’s pledges of blind devotion become grimly funny (“sometimes all I need is the air that I breathe/and to love you”); the larger point, though, is that is soaring, ethereal melody has been echoed over the decades by artists like Radiohead and Lana Del Ray – a vivid if circuitous way of illustrating that, for Top 40 hits and world religions both, there really are no new ideas under the Sun.
There is, potentially, a brilliant and self-reflexive satirical conceit at the heart of Heretic, which has to do with the tactics of marketing old ideas to emerging, tastemaking demographics. Mr. Reed’s rhetoric about repackaged profundities could just as easily be skewering the cult of A24 and elevated horror as the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter Day Saints (who, as the script notes, have already taken a mainstream beating via the South Park guys).
Woods and Beck are zeitgeist surfing here, and in a moment when every Redditor with a copy of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion fancies themselves an amateur theologian, the film’s set-up has a genuine tingle; there’s a schadenfreud-ish satisfaction in watching our fresh-faced, God-fearing heroines (wonderfully played by Chloe East and Sophie Thatcher) get systematically disillusioned, one hypothetical at a time. (It helps that Grant is a good enough actor to weaponise his charm-offensive persona in ways that draw blood).
But there’s a difference between engaging in a good-faith argument and trying to corner it, and as it goes on, Heretic increasingly feels synced with the smug grandstanding of its antagonist. It swaps out the wry, creepy humour of its opening scenes for unconvincing Grand Guignol and subordinates dramatic logic to a set of plot gimmicks whose blatant shamelessness is ultimately unforgivable, whether for an audience or some hovering higher power.
► Heretic arrives in UK cinemas 1 November.