HERETIC (2024)

Two young Mormon missionaries knock on the wrong door...

by Barnaby Page 4th November 20244th November 2024 Leave a reply

Halfway through Heretic, I didn’t duck out to the foyer to grab an espresso. It’s the first film in a long time where I haven’t done that, and though Heretic isn’t a perfect movie, my survival of 111 minutes without caffeine speaks to its greatest strength: it is, for much of its running time, absolutely riveting. Onto the simplest of premises—two Mormon missionaries meet an apparently promising prospective convert who turns out to be (perhaps) the militant atheist from hell—it piles one intriguing idea after another, giving the screenplay and the actors plenty of time to explore them while varying the rhythm just enough to keep us fascinated. There are long expository speeches, there are tense silences, there is exactly the right number of well-timed surprises.

Towards the end it does lose its grip somewhat, resorting to more conventional horror tropes, and at this point the unreality which wasn’t a problem in the first half becomes more awkward. In terms of both philosophy and plot, Heretic is better at posing questions than providing satisfactory answers to them, and once the questions grow more practical the implausibilities in the answers become points of weakness for the narrative, rather than interesting springboards for further discussion.

Up until then, though, it’s perfectly judged, thoroughly entertaining, and never quite what one expects. This is apparent from the first scene, where the young missionaries, Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East), are sitting at a bus stop and discussing… well, things you wouldn’t expect Mormon missionaries to be discussing! Deft writing, direction and acting delineate their characters quickly and effectively: Sister Paxton is the less worldly of the two (she uses not-quite-right phrases like “intercourse sex”, she stumbles repeatedly on the pronunciation of “pornography”), Sister Barnes may have secrets (where did that long scar on her arm come from?).

They’re going from home to home, apparently following up on people who have previously expressed an interest in Mormonism, and on their list is the isolated little house of Mr Reed (Hugh Grant). A storm begins as they arrive at his door and Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (A Quiet Place), the writer-directors, happily keep it running throughout the film as a source of atmosphere; first, though, it serves an important plotting purpose by providing a reason for Mr Reed to invite them in, and for them to accept.

He seems charming, an amiable eccentric who promises them blueberry pie, though the slightest of warning bells may begin to ring when it becomes apparent he is already very well-informed about Mormonism, and has no intention of just sitting back and listening. The missionaries’ concerns grow slowly but steadily as one thing after another starts to feel wrong—there’s the continued non-appearance of his much-mentioned wife, there’s a very clever and nicely-shot reveal involving a scented candle—and they’re on full alert by the point that he claims the front door’s deadbolt is on a timer, and he therefore can’t open it to let them out. The layout of an inner room in his house, with what seem to be an altar and pews, raises suspicions in the audience too: are we maybe dealing with a devil-worshipper here?

The full explanation of Mr Reed’s very personal faith, when it comes, is not quite that simple (and in fact is a little muddy—it’s another weakness of the final act). But really, who or what he is doesn’t matter so much as how he interacts with the young women: the whole setup is a pretext for lengthy, dialogue-based scenes that range from the history of Mormonism, to a discussion of why Judaism has fewer adherents than the other “religions of the book”, to the history of Monopoly, via Radiohead and the simulation hypothesis and a great deal more besides.

Tackling the subject of religion head-on like this is commercially delicate for a mass-market film. In Heretic’s country of origin an overt espousal of atheism will alienate many viewers, while taking an overtly pro-faith stance runs the risk of being pigeonholed as a Christian (or, even worse for the box office, specifically Mormon) film. Beck and Woods sidestep this quite nicely by making the two missionaries so likeable that we can root for them even if we don’t share their religious views, and the film argues—more or less openly—that the better practices of religion can have human value even if the religious beliefs themselves are untrue. Its ending might hint at the existence of the supernatural, or might not: Heretic is carefully designed to be compatible with a wide range of convictions.

Mr Reed does most of the intellectual heavy lifting in Heretic’s religious discourse, but Beck and Woods do give the missionaries their chances to respond—Heretic most certainly does not condescend to them or treat them as unintelligent, even if Mr Reed has that tendency—and all three have plenty of opportunities to hint at the emotional undercurrents of these scenes, the young women’s heightening fear and Mr Reed’s delight in controlling them. There is occasional humour to briefly lift the intensity—“Spider-Man?” asks Sister Paxton, about a quote; “Voltaire,” replies Mr Reed. And though there’s not a whole lot of narrative development in the ordinary sense, not one moment of this is ever tedious.

As is so often the case in horror, the missionaries and Mr Reed are relatively thin as characters—they’re ultimately there to deliver the screenplay, to do stuff and to have stuff done to them, rather than to be fully believable human beings. Still, Sisters Barnes and Paxton come across as such nice, genuine ones that we do end up empathising strongly with them, while the unknowns around Mr Reed (we have no idea at all of his history, for example) only add to his air of threat.

And the reduction of characters to cogs in the machine isn’t, anyway, much of an issue here as it would be in a film that’s also purporting to be a human drama—a good example from this year would be Guillem Morales’s The Wasp. By contrast, Heretic is much more akin to films like Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Sleuth (1972), where the ideas and the narrative sleight of hand, rather than the people, are the whole point. “What do games have to do with us leaving?” asks Sister Barnes, and Mr Reed replies “everything”.

In any case, despite these limitations on the actors, all three manage to deliver outstanding performances. Grant’s Mr Reed is of course far more flamboyant than the two women, with his self-effacing smiles, his jokey funny voices, his little puns and quips (he says he’ll be a “momentino”) not quite concealing a steeliness beneath. What makes him really frightening is that his disarmingly friendly manner doesn’t seem to be entirely a disguise; it seems he actually is folksy, hospitable and utterly ruthless, all at the same time. The two missionaries are less complicated but Thatcher—who was the best thing in the otherwise underwhelming The Boogyman (2023)—and East do a great job of differentiating them and making their Mormon heritage continually detectable yet never completely dominant. They seem unable not to smile; the ingrained politeness that East’s Sister Paxton can’t quite abandon, even at the worst of times, speaks volumes about both her and her culture.

Given the baroque intricacies of the film’s long dialogue-driven sequences, Beck, Woods and cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon wisely keep it visually simple. Ample close-ups add to the claustrophobia, while bold, plain shots of lone things—a clock, feet, a door, a box of matches on a carpet—remind us that despite all the philosophising going on, in physical terms the missionaries’ problem is very basic. They’re locked in a place they don’t want to be locked in.

Intermittently, much more mobile tracking shots provide touches of variety, as do occasional scenes outside the house featuring a Mormon Elder (Topher Grace). Like the storm, though, these scenes are not inherently important, and presumably are there primarily to add intensity to the main narrative. It is also enhanced at points by powerful music, sometimes more of a soundscape than a conventional score, provided by Chris Bacon—who also composed effectively for Beck and Woods’s weird 65 (2023).

Heretic works so well in so many ways that it’s a real disappointment when many of these strengths collapse toward the end, and it starts to look like a familiar girls-trapped-in-psycho’s-cellar movie. All the questions which seemed important and tantalising earlier on become lost in a more basic good-vs-evil opposition; who cares whether you can prove the existence of one god over another when it’s stab or be stabbed? Things that never really made sense (like the house’s layout) also now start to jeopardise the suspension of disbelief, and when another character is briefly introduced, a half-baked attempt to explain an apparently inexplicable aspect of them just makes matters worse.

Perhaps it’s ironic (or just, just possibly it’s deliberate) that a film which is all about belief and the questioning of it eventually falls down not because it asks us to make a leap of faith, but because it tries—and fails—to produce rational explanations. Still, despite that slump toward the end, Heretic is for the most part a superbly entertaining, finely acted, and highly original film that stands out sharply from the usual slew of Halloween horrors. Nobody will need caffeine while this one’s underway.