What’s scarier than believing in a higher power? Not believing in a higher power. This dichotomy of human existence is channeled through Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’s thoroughly entertaining “Heretic,” a thriller about the terrifying nature of belief. There have been hundreds of horror flicks about religious zealots using violence to get their way, but this clever flick is more of a mind game, a study in not just what stories we’re told but who has been telling them to us. It’s about thousands of years of distillations of the same basic narratives into barely different religions that have shaped the course of human history. And it’s all filtered through a gloriously tense lens, making for a genre flick that’s both satisfying on a primal level and an intellectual one. It’s designed to quicken your pulse and your mind at the same time, which is too rare in genre filmmaking. It’s also gorgeously made, and wonderfully performed. As is somewhat naturally the case with a film that’s about the vagaries of belief, it loses steam when it has to provide answers to some of its questions in the final act, but this is still a sharp movie that should be a sizable hit for A24.
Two young members of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East) have answered a request for more information from a man named Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant). They first follow their dictum and refuse to enter Mr. Reed’s home until a woman is present, but he insists that his wife is in the other room baking a pie. They can even smell the cooking blueberries in the air. So they enter and begin a theological discussion with Reed, who turns the tables almost immediately, sort of giving the girls an interview about faith and belief. After all, they believe in a higher power almost like they believe his wife is in the kitchen. Because they’ve been told so.
Without spoiling much, Mr. Reed has other plans for Sisters Barnes and Paxton, essentially putting them through a series of increasingly brutal tests. The first half of this movie is wonderfully tense, shaped by the young women trying to find their balance between their calling and their mounting fear. Can they talk their way out of something that’s getting increasingly threatening? Is there even a right answer to Mr. Reed’s questions? The script by Beck and Woods is a marvelous blend of religious history and sociopathic behavior. It’s “Saw” meets “Silence.”
And Grant is having a blast delivering it. He’s been leaning into a bit of a dark edge in his actor’s bag of tricks recently and this is his best work in years. However, he is well-matched by Thatcher and especially East. Her Paxton is easily the less street-savvy of the two—just the way she says the word “pornography” in the film’s opening conversation feels like character development—but East refuses to play her as a simple damsel-in-distress. This is basically a three-hander for almost its entire runtime, and it would fall apart with actors who didn’t understand the assignment as much as Thatcher, Grant, and East do.
With its limited set, it helps a great deal to have a masterful cinematographer to shoot “Heretic,” and so kudos to whoever hired Chung-hoon Chung, the man who shot “The Handmaiden,” “Oldboy,” and many others. His camera swoops through this increasingly threatening house in such a captivating manner, staring down its dark hallways and staircases in a way that allows us to feel the tension and claustrophobia so strongly that we forget it’s a set. His directors also LOVE faces, keeping us close on tear-filled eyes and malevolent smiles. The tight filmmaking traps us with the leads, which is so essential to the film’s success. (Although I could have gone for even more showy camerawork, to be honest. This crazy movie could have used a few more canted angles, but I digress.)
As one would imagine in a film that’s so dialogue-heavy for the first third, there comes a turning point in “Heretic” when Mr. Reed’s plans have to turn into action, and the film loses some of its inherent power when a movie about the unknown is forced to show some known. Having said that, there are versions of this film that fall apart completely, and “Heretic” never does that. Thinking about some of the actual narrative choices of the final act in retrospect makes some of them feel kind of silly, but that’s not the case in the moment, when we feel as trapped and helpless as Sister Paxton and Sister Barnes.
The true horror of “Heretic” doesn’t come through violent action as much as what Reed’s elaborate plans say about the human condition. Why do we believe what we believe? Is it just because we’ve been told to do so? Or is there something beyond the many books that Reed claims to have read? “Heretic” is a horror movie about some of the most soul-rattling ideas in history, including not just that there’s nothing after death but that everything we’ve built our lives on has been a lie. And yet it’s not a film that’s as anti-religious as that sounds. It leaves some of its biggest questions for you to answer. If you’re courageous enough to do so.
This review was filed from the Toronto International Film Festival. It opens on November 15th.
