Home invasion is a mainstay of horror cinema. So is religion and its supposed tireless fight against demonic entities. When we turn both these tropes on their heads, we get Heretic, a horror film about unbelief, in which two Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints missionaries knock on the wrong door and find they can’t leave. This clever chamber drama comes to us from the team of Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who wrote A Quiet Place and directed 65.
The deal
Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East) are weary from a long day of trying to convert unbelievers to their faith — and being taunted by teenagers who ask to see their “magic underwear.”
When they arrive at the home of Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant), a cheery fellow in a dorky sweater, the two young missionaries find him eager to discuss metaphysical matters. Their rules don’t permit them to consort with lone men, but Reed assures them his wife is just in the next room, baking a blueberry pie.
Barnes, a convert herself and the more worldly and skeptical of the two, side-eyes Reed’s warm welcome from the beginning. But even naïve, bubbly Paxton soon knows something’s wrong. The front door won’t open, and the two women are trapped with a charmingly dithery man who is determined to test the limits of their faith.
Will you like it?
Given the way movies are marketed now, no one is likely to see Heretic without knowing its genre. But if someone did, they might be deeply confused for the first third of the film, which is simply a tense three-person drama with a lot of talk about religion.
Beck and Woods’ screenplay is savvy to all the angles of the situation: the young women’s unease and strategic use of flattery and deference; the older man’s dismay at the generation gap. The writer-directors make us wait a long time for the various tensions to explode into violence, ratcheting up the dread by degrees as cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung’s camera tracks around the dim, frowzy rooms of Reed’s home. Its restless movement expresses the audience’s anxiety, while our two protagonists remain frozen in a strained facsimile of politeness.
As for Reed, he has a show to put on for the missionaries, complete with props, lectures and magic tricks. Grant makes sly use of his comic talents in this bravura performance, as funny as it’s frightening. One moment, Reed is a harmless grandpa, trading jokes with the women; the next, he’s a gadfly eager to mansplain them out of their faith. (Haven’t we all met a few dogmatic skeptics like this?) He postures and struts like Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc, atheist preacher and spiritual detective in one.
Heretic plays archly on whodunit conventions: the domestic setting, the carefully planted clues, the rewards it gives us for being observant. But the only real mystery here is how far Reed will go to imprint his worldview on the two missionaries, and whether they will survive the process. (Squeamish viewers should know that things do get bloody, though it takes a while.)
Religion is a fixture of horror because it’s the last bulwark of the supernatural against Enlightenment rationalism. Even when movies depict priests and nuns as demon-fighting heroes, their comfortable relationship with the spirit world gives them a creepy aura.
So part of what makes Heretic original and clever is that Paxton and Barnes are so normal. Far from caricatures of sunny Mormon piety or clueless victims, these are characters with individual relationships to their faith and a believable rapport, young women who think and talk about sex and pop culture and the power of marketing (a resonant theme for the whole film). We see immediately that Barnes is a match for Reed, thanks to Thatcher’s canny reserve. It takes us longer to register that Paxton’s girlish innocence hides reserves of smarts and stubbornness.
A house can be a refuge, or it can be a prison. Faith can likewise be either of those things — as can a devout lack of faith, for that matter. Heretic takes a heretically humanist approach to religion, presenting it not as magic but as a coping mechanism for a terrifying world. Here, the horror lies not in ritual or its blasphemous perversion but in the egotism of an antagonist who seeks to prove the nonexistence of all gods by taking their place.
The movie has its share of twists, turns and scares — including some moments that could be either faith-affirming or nihilistic, depending on your interpretation. At its core, though, Heretic is satire in the Jonathan Swift vein. It suggests that all the horrors otherworldly entities could inflict on us are nothing compared with what we’d do to each other just to win an argument.
If you like this, try…
Barbarian (2022; Disney+, Hulu, rentable): Double-booking is only the first of an Airbnb guest’s problems in Zach Cregger’s horror film — which, like Heretic, eases us from an everyday situation into a domestic nightmare.
The Invitation (2015; Kanopy, Peacock, Pluto TV, Prime Video, Sling TV, Tubi, rentable): “Hospitality can be hell” is also the premise of this tense psychological thriller directed by Karyn Kusama (not to be confused with the 2022 film of the same name), in which a dinner party takes an unsettling turn for a man visiting his ex-wife.
Martyrs (2008; PLEX, Tubi, YouTube Primetime, rentable): This famously disturbing Montréal-shot film about an abused woman’s revenge shares with Heretic a fascination with the links between faith, suffering and transcendence.
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This article appears in The Winter Preview Issue 2024.
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