What comes to mind when you think of horror movies about faith? It's a combination with a rich cinematic history, with everything from the late great William Friedkin's enduring classic The Exorcist through to more modern works like Robert Eggers' terrifying The Witch or Rose Glass' searing Saint Maud offering brutal, yet just as darkly beautiful, visions about belief.
However, how many of them can say they have Hugh Grant as a smooth-talking, sinister man who traps two Mormon missionaries in his home and puts them through a series of grim tests?
This is the hook of Heretic, the latest movie from the filmmaking duo of Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who penned the frequently eerily effective if a bit overstretched adaptation of the Stephen King story The Boogeyman from last year and wrote/directed the action misfire 65. Built around Grant's great performance — one of his most villainous yet, which makes his turns in the playful family comedy Paddington 2 and the surprisingly decent Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves look quaint by comparison — it's a talky work with pages upon pages of dialogue for him to devour.
This is where the film is strongest, keeping us on our toes as it ratchets up the tension until descending into a sadly more slight and shallow second half. Still, for that first bit, it's solid stuff. Observing the menacing Mr. Reed (Grant) verbally sparring with the initially unsuspecting duo of Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East) before offering them a choice (that is, of course, a false one), you find yourself drawn in. Just three people in a single labyrinthian location gives the actors room to play off each other as the danger grows more unavoidable and the dread inescapably suffocating. Grant wields his charm like a weapon, using it to see how long his creepy character can keep his visitors before they start asking questions. The disappointment comes in the perfunctory answers and oddly scattered scares that follow.
As The Hollies' 1974 classic "The Air That I Breathe" begins to play over and over, an excellent song choice that still marks the moment where things start to come apart, Heretic struggles to grasp for something more profound. The monologues about faith Grant gives are like a cross between the insufferable pretentiousness of Bill Maher and the enjoyably ridiculous moral philosophizing of John Kramer from the Saw movies. This should be more pointedly fun, though. it's all played with such a straight face that the film starts to buckle under its own weight.
Even as cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung — who has shot plenty of truly magnificent films with the filmmaker Park Chan-wook such as The Handmaiden, Thirst, Lady Vengeance, and Oldboy — does similarly strong work here in every frame, he can't save Heretic from the emptiness at its core.
Namely, the more we are taken into the darkness lurking beneath the house, the more it lives in the shadow of the gruesome nightmare of a film like Pascal Laugier's Martyrs. Though nowhere near as defined by extreme violence and gore, the final test Heretic builds to is so blatantly similar to that film that it feels like Beck and Woods are just doing a more palatable recreation of an already significant work. Without tipping anything off, both films end up being about peering beyond our world. However, where Martyrs sees this all the way through with a bloody, bleakly humorous conclusion, Heretic just peters out with lackluster reversals and a few blunt twists.
One could generously say this is almost by design, as Grant's character spells out at one point how everything from religion to culture is not only in debt to what came before but becomes essentially repackaged for each new generation. That's still a stretch though, as not only is the writing here not nearly robust and smart enough to pull this off, but the film repeatedly fumbles at the finish line of what was already an experience of lesser ideas. There is something worth believing in with Heretic, especially with Grant's performance, but the overall picture it paints can't hold a candle to the prior works from which it draws. It's blasphemous only in how derivative it is.
Heretic
Rated R
Directed by Scott Beck & Bryan Woods
Starring Hugh Grant, Sophie Thatcher, Chloe East
