What happens if you turn wayward, dithery rom-com Hugh Grant all the way up to 11? Heretic is the answer, a through-the-looking-glass turn by Grant whose good guy/bad guy turn as a householder giving two young Mormon women a night they won’t forget is this movie’s main event.
First we meet the young women – Sister Paxton (Chloe East) and Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) – in a scene designed to demonstrate to us their everydayness. With their coy chat about Magnum condoms, penises and online porn, Bates and Paxton also demonstrate to each other that they are everyday normal young women, just ones who happen to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
And then on to meet the star of the show, Grant, as Mr Reed, a potential new member of the Church, or so his recent expression of interest has seemed to indicate. Calling at his home during a howling storm, Paxton and Barnes are welcomed inside by the friendly, charming and yes dithery Mr Reed, who assures the young women that his wife is out back baking blueberry pie.
There is no wife, no blueberry pie. Instead in scenes of escalating uneasiness, Reed first quizzes the women about articles of Mormon faith, then pinpoints problematical aspects of the religion – the role of polygamy, for example – which Paxton and Bates attempt to answer with good humour and honesty, all the while becoming increasingly nervous about the line of questioning, and wondering if Mrs Reed really is out back in the kitchen.
By the time Reed gets on to talk of the “one true religion” and pointing out that Mormonism is just another variant on the doctrinal meme that seems to have been re-iterating itself down the generations, using as a parable the case of the Hollies song The Air That I Breathe becoming Radiohead’s Creep becoming Lana Del Rey’s Get Free – take it up with Mr Reed if you have an issue with this – the young women are terrified.
The film is by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, two guys who have been writing and directing mostly horror movies for the best part of 20 years. They co-wrote A Quiet Place (with John Krasinski) and both write and direct here. They’re particularly good at escalating the dread, which is doubly impressive when it is absolutely obvious which way this story is going from the first moment Hugh Grant opens the door to Thatcher and East’s soaking wet young women on the dark and stormy night.
The strangely old fashioned decor, the underlit interior, the way one of Reed’s rooms seems to resemble a chapel of some sort – big candlesticks, a slabby centrally placed table that might double as an altar – all things point towards Reed being some sort of Satanist. Surely there’s a dungeon somewhere? Surely there is.
Thatcher and East are easy on the eye but there’s no need to fall back on their looks since their carefully graduated performances as two very unworldly women being taken up the garden path are excellent.
By 40 minutes in the masks are off and it’s clear what Mr Reed is up to. I’ll just say he’s malevolent and leave it at that.
Whether god is invented by humanity as an existential comforter, whether miracles and magic tricks are the same thing, whether religion is nothing more than a system of control wielded by the powerful, all the undergraduate atheistic arguments are wheeled out by Reed, but interestingly the last word this time out goes to the believers.
The film’s great strength is its conceptual conceit – that feeling of being trapped by someone doing god in your face is seized by Beck and Woods, spun 180 and weaponised. As for Grant’s performance, which is awards-bait, it does play with the Grant persona – or, more specifically the old Grant persona he’d already abandoned in favour of villain turns (A Very English Scandal, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Paddington 2) – and it is very creepy and very effective. There might also be too much of it for some tastes, there was for mine. But then the movie is 20 minutes too long, time enough to find and play The Hollies, Radiohead and Lana Del Rey.
Heretic – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
