REVIEW — “Heretic”

Hugh Grant is deliciously devious in A24’s wickedly entertaining Heretic, a diabolical and twisted religious horror mind game that will make you question everything you believe.

A twisted choose-your-own-adventure Heretic follows two young door-to-door missionaries Sister Paxton (Chloe East) and Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) sent by their local Mormon church to witness to a Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant) who has expressed an interest in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

It begins to storm as the “Sisters” arrive at Mr. Reed’s door. A seemingly pleasant and friendly gentleman, Mr. Reed politely invites them inside to get out of the rain. At first, they decline, informing him they cannot enter without another woman present, to which he offers to bring his wife in from the kitchen. They agree, and as they wait in his living room for his wife to arrive with blueberry pie, as he has assured them she will, he pulls out his personal dogeared and annotated copy of The Book of Mormon, quizzes the pair about their religion, and presents them with rebuttals and comparisons designed to challenge their belief system.

His kindliness and hospitality quickly fading, Reed frequently steps out of the room for long periods of time, allowing the young women time and privacy to consider their devolving situation. This creates a fantastic slow-burning tension. The girls are clearly uncomfortable, but don’t want to be rude and insist on believing that they are safe, despite all the red flags. In a shocking moment of truth, Reed finally asks them if they still believe his wife exists in the other room and what makes them continue to believe that? Realizing they are trapped inside his home, the pair must prove their faith in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse to ascertain the one true religion if they want to make it out alive.

Grant has never been better as the film’s deceptively charming host. The actor’s famously befuddled charisma serves him in the devilishly villainous role of a manipulative religious scholar with an underlying darkness and the persuasiveness to tempt doubt in the faithful. However, he is well-matched by the Mormon Sisters.

Thatcher’s self-assured and more worldly Sister Barnes poses a bigger threat to Reed’s dominance; however, it is East’s Sister Paxton that is the film’s real stand-out. Chloe East is simply phenomenal in the star-turning role. While timid and certainly more sheltered than Barnes, Paxton is wise, funny and observant. Her innocence and naivete is on full display in the film’s opening scene when the pair are sitting on a park bench and she clumsily uses the words “sexing” and “porno-ography” to describe sex, as if her mother were within ear shot.

Written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods and set to an unsettling score by Chris Bacon, Heretic is brilliantly shot with the dark hallways and steep staircases of Mr. Reed’s labyrinthine home framed in a way that enhances the claustrophobic tension of the trapped characters. The film is structured as a dialogue-heavy stage play has a lot to say about organized religion and contains in-depth theological discussions that give you plenty to ponder on your ride home, such as, is God/Heaven real or do we believe what we believe simply because we’ve been told to?

That’s not to say that Heretic is an anti-religion film. While it is a superb horror movie about some of humanity’s most fundamental questions, the film leaves some of its biggest questions for its audience to answer. Ultimately, the strength of the film exists in the doubt between belief and disbelief, where it keeps the audience as conflicted and terrified as Sisters Paxton and Barnes when debating what lies behind Reed’s two doors. 4/5

Rated R with a running time of 1 hour, 50 minutes, Heretic opens in theaters on November 8, 2024.