Religious horror has been a sucessuful sub genre since 1970’s. Horror, in general, likes to ratchet up social fears to the extreme, but religious horror wrestles with something that audiences have no physical concept of: faith. With Heretic, the new film by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, there’s a wonderful subversion to the model. Instead of the devil, demons, or a corrupt church trying to bring about the second coming, our villain is an atheist. Bringing in the complete denial of faith feels like a fresh direction for a religious horror movie to take, but unfortunately, Heretic has more traditional horror tropes on its mind.
With little in the way of exposition, we’re introduced to Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton (Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East), two Mormon missionaries who are out riding their bikes, spreading the good word of Jesus Christ. On their final scheduled stop, they visit Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant), who by all appearances, is a good natured, charming Englishman, whose wife is just in the other room baking a blueberry pie. As the conversation unfolds, they learn he is a theologian who has studied the Book of Mormon even more than they have. The chatting isn’t completely bogged down with religious talk, as Mr. Reed asks them questions about their upbringing and fast food. With the promise of pie still not fulfilled and the conversation leading into some strange directions, it’s Sister Barnes who starts getting suspicious of Reed’s intentions.
The first 40 or so minutes of this film are TENSE. Beck and Woods give us glimpses of things that imply that these two are not safe and are not going to leave the way they came. As our two leads move into the next phase of the house, they are stuck in a room filled with religious imagry and two doors, which Reed casually labels “Belief” and “Disbelief”. In other horror films, this is a scene where we’d be introduced to the serial killer’s dungeon, or the evil satanic seance room. Instead, and in an even more frightening manner, Mr. Reed gives the two a lecture about how all montheistic religions are the same. The points being made are full of pop culture references from Radiohead to Jar Jar Binks. Hugh Grant plays Reed like a cross between the sociopathic pop obsession of Patrick Bateman and the pandering atheism of Ricky Gervais. This is absolutely the stand out scene of the film, full of uncomfortable laughter and genuine dread.
Thatcher and East need to play terrified for 90% of this movie and they nail it. The initial reveal of the blueberry pie smell coming from a scented candle washes over Sophie Thatcher’s face like she’s making one hundred different connections at once. Paxton, played by Chloe East, is the more naive of the two and thinks playing into his game will at least get them somewhere other than sitting in fright. Their dynamic works well off of each other and make for a partnership that doesn’t just feel like the same person copy and pasted onto another. The naivety that Paxton plays into sets up some stakes that do pay off, but the direction it ends up in feels like a poor misdirect.
Similarly to the blueberry pie, the film feels like it’s setting up a certain type of journey, but the promise is never fufilled. As Barnes and Paxton progress, they also sort of stay in the same place. Mr. Reed is watching and following them with a small scale model of his labeyrinthian home, but we never really get a good impression of it. We get exterior shots of his home on a hill during the immense snowstorm. It looks something like Frankenstein’s castle, but we never feel the proportion from inside. One would think this would add to a claustrophobic atmosphere, but it really just makes you disappointed in the waste of potential. Escape room designers have a term they use in constructing their puzzles where when you want to explain why something bad is happening, things get “suddenly satanic”. Of course you’d think a film that deals with Mormons is likely to end up in a “suddenly satanic” spot, but Heretic does such a good job avoiding that that when its own version of satan appears, it feels cheap.
3 out of 5 stars
Heretic might satisfy horror fans looking for a fix post-Halloween, but its puzzle box premise ends up being more of an expensive, but not well thought out escape room. Though disappointing, the performances, especially Hugh Grant playing deliciously against type, are enough fun to recommend the film.
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