"Heretic" Doesn't Deviate Enough from Horror-Movie Doctrines
When Mormon missionaries come to the door, some of us want to run and hide, but others just love to mess with them, yours truly being one of those.
Yet no one in real life has ever messed with Mormons more than Mr. Reed in “Heretic,” the latest horror movie from A24 Studios.
That provenance alone had me hoping for something thoughtful. For the first half of the movie, “Heretic” is arresting indeed.
But then the movie, having nowhere to go, mirroring the main characters’ descent into a basement of no exit, relies on typical horror standbys to get out of its third act.
In fact the movie treats its audience as smart enough to hear reasoned arguments against religion, and then decides in the middle of things that they are too dumb for further conversation.
The one great pleasure “Heretic” offers is Hugh Grant’s devilish turn as a superficially charming yet psychotic Mr. Reed, another white, old, horror-movie man who invites two young lovely Mormon missionary women to his dark, creepy house.
Although the ladies think he wants to be witnessed to, right from the beginning, the movie’s ominous shots and the house’s scarily remote location tell us that Reed has no good intentions. Nothing’s ever in doubt here as to what might ensue between Reed and the women.
The movie blows massively great opportunities; it could mess with us, just as Reed messes with the girls, yet that never really happens.
The first act-and-a-half contains a feint towards a psychological thriller with heavy doses of philosophical conversation, as Mr. Reed tries to talk to the girls about the history and presuppositions of religion.
They’re on a typical Mormon mission, hoping to convert enough souls to please their church and themselves. They arrive at his door at his behest, and they enter because he tells them he’s got a wife in the kitchen.
Well, as anybody would know, the “wife” definitely isn’t there. And once it’s proven that Reed’s front door is locked, from which there’s no escape, the girls know they are in for a horror-movie setup: trapped in an isolated container, Reed’s labyrinthine house, with a psychopath slowly stalking them.
Is Reed just that? If the writers wanted to be clever, and they do hint that they trying for cleverness, then he wouldn’t be. Or else it would be complicated.
Alas, and no spoilers here, but Reed becomes exactly what the movie has signaled he would be all along.
The only thing saving this turn to cliché is Grant, playing off his charming English-gentleman type, enrichening Reed’s twisted presentation of New Atheism to the Mormons.
The two girls, Sister Paxton and Sister Barnes, are well played by Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East. But they have less and less to do as their characters are forced into deeper layers of Reed’s house. At each new level of the house, Reed tries to convince them that religion, particularly Mormonism, is poppycock.
All of this is done under the pretense of free choice, yet Reed controls everything like a puppetmaster.
The film never hedges; his psycho white-guy character’s point-of-view is linked inextricably with some version of New Atheism. These days, you make an older dude character mansplain to two scared girls whom he’s entrapping, and you are saying absolutely nothing good about whatever he stands for.
Even though “Heretic” does make fun of Mormonism a bit, by comparing that religion to Reed, I’d rather be wearing “magic underwear” — the movie can’t stop bringing that up about Mormons — than believing in Reed’s deep doubts.
As he tells the girls, he’s on the quest to know the One True Religion. He thinks he’s found it, and in his house of horrors, he’ll try to make the girls find it out, too.
The best scenes, somewhere in the middle, involve Grant flamboyantly showcasing Reed’s playful mind. He mixes a lecture on “religious iterations” with the history of the game Monopoly, Jar Jar Binks, and Radiohead’s “Creep.”
Yet would you expect an A24 horror movie, with a psycho like Reed, to not only play “Creep” but have that psycho character sing bits of the song?
No, of course that would be too cliché.
And yet here’s Mr. Grant, singing ala Thom Yorke, “I’m a weeeee-eeeeerr-do.”
Once that playful conversation in Reed’s library ends with the girls choosing between a door marked “Belief” and a door marked “Disbelief,” in hopes that one of the doors leads to an exit, the movie descends into expected Horror traps.
It even goes beyond disbelief itself. I don’t recall seeing characters stabbed in the neck, with pints of blood spraying out of their arteries, being able to do things like the characters do here.
Had Mr. Reed watched this movie himself, he’d begin believing in miracles, too.
My wild hunch is the writers had a fine concept — the two Mormon missionaries at the house of a playful psycho, undergoing his twisted lessons on the One True Religion — but no strong way to conclude things.
The movie has massive potential as a psychological thriller with potent doses of philosophical discussion, but the doctrinal pull of the Horror-Movie Craze has turned Heretic’s provocative concept into a nearly two-hour descent into a torture-dungeon in which a man makes two young girls cry the entire time.
Thereby, Heretic makes a better case for Mormonism than two missionaries at your door.
At the least, you’d rather believe something than nothing, ala Mr. Reed, who ends up as another iteration of a horror-movie “weeee-eeeeer-do.”