Hugh Grant’s career-spanning reinvention, from rom-com lead to charming villain, marches on. Recent examples include David E. Kelley’s 2020 HBO miniseries The Undoing and 2023’s Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. In Heretic, a film by writer/director duo Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, Hugh Grant has perfected the recipe: A spoonful of menace, a dash of nuanced malevolence, sugary smarm to taste.
Heretic will not push any boundaries or open any new doors. Its philosophizing is showy guff, and it knows it. But Hugh Grant has taken what could have been a grating and forgettable add to the endless list of modern horror, and with sheer verve turned it into a fun, tense, capital-M Movie.
Beck and Woods are no strangers to horror and suspense. Following a string of small features, they struck success with their screenplay for 2018’s A Quiet Place, now a bona fide franchise. After helming 2023’s poorly received sci-fi action-thriller 65, the duo has returned with their smallest story yet, and the gambit has mostly paid off.
Heretic follows Sister Paxton (Chloe East) and Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher), Mormon missionaries on their first outing for the church. After fulfilling their appointment with Mr. Reed (Grant), a reclusive Englishman who has asked to know more about the LDS, they find themselves trapped in his elaborately designed house, forced to play out a series of macabre games designed to test their faith.
The premise, boiled down, is: What if Christopher Hitchens were Jigsaw? It never quite rises above that, but the result is eminently watchable.
What’s remarkable about Heretic is that, for a film of its class – and we’re talking schlock here – Beck and Woods get a phenomenal amount of mileage out of three people sitting in a room. This is classic single-location horror, and most of its runtime is spent in conversation.
Start to finish Heretic is dialogue-driven in a way that few films can match. For the most part, it actually works. Grant’s grand speeches are pretty silly; if you walk in expecting a nuanced theological dissertation you will probably leave disappointed. But it’s packed with enough punch to satisfy a more lighthearted reading.
The writing is clever – it feels very written, but again, that’s the point. In the hands of lesser performers it may have easily come apart at the Psalms, er, seams — but Grant arguably gives one of the performances of his life. You can’t take your eyes off of him.
East and Thatcher are given much less to do – mostly they stand around, eyes welling with tears, until it’s finally time to fight back – but they’re competently characterized, and play well off Grant and each other.
Heretic’s first hour is more thriller than horror, and the film may have been more successful had it stayed there. It does find its way to horror eventually, with some surprisingly disturbing beats by its middling finale. The revelations don’t match the excitement of the buildup, but it’s a well-constructed ride.
Chris Bacon’s score feels set for a TV drama, and adds some nice gravity to a few tender moments. If anything, the music cues give an overall sense that Heretic knows exactly what it is: A24 doing their best Blumhouse impression.
Heretic is shot by Chung-hoon Chung, a frequent collaborator of Park Chan-wook’s, having lensed Oldboy, The Handmaiden and others, as well as 2017’s It. Chung’s distinct eye goes a long way toward selling the limited environments as engaging spaces for the small cast. The staging has an elaborate feel, despite being so confined in its scope, and it’s entirely thanks to Chung.
The theological rhetoric Grant spends most of his time prattling about never quite exceeds what you’d find in an atheist’s subreddit, but thankfully it’s Grant doing the prattling. Have faith: it won’t change your mind or your heart, but if you’ve got twenty bucks and a spare evening you could do a lot worse than Heretic.
[Want another take on Heretic? Read our other review of the film.]
