Funereal Plots
Horror Cinema reviews

Matthew M. Bartlett

Heretic

Writers/Directors: Scott Beck and Bryan Woods

I am a sucker for movies that seem like stage plays. Simple, single sets; a lot of well-written dialogue: I’m happy. I am also, as you may have guessed, a devotee of horror movies. Heretic, in its first hour or so, seemed to tick both those boxes for me. And then it swerved into conventionality—it started to look and sound like the lowest common denominator.

Heretic starts off with some quasi-sexual dialogue between Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East), a pair of sweetly naïve Mormon missionaries. This scene sets up their characters and, it would seem, foreshadows a far different kind of horror movie than this turns out to be.

The pair has on their list of potentially interested possible converts a Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant). Reed, a middle-aged man played with menace thinly veiled behind loquacious, self-effacing charm, assuages the girls’ trepidations by assuring them that his wife is in the house, baking a blueberry pie. The fact that the smell of blueberry pie comes from a candle sets off a discussion of faith, belief, evidence, and atheism. Absorbing, if a little “Nonbelief-101,” this is all underscored by the tension the audience feels—red flag after red flag—in knowing that these girls will be Mr. Reed’s captive.

The movie begins to falter after Mr. Reed talks about how each religion steals concepts, themes, and key figures from religions that preceded them—one of the Mormon girls offers the (weak, easily-refuted) riposte that each of these religions has its own unique aspects.

Mr. Reed doesn’t bite—he seems to think that this is somehow a good point. Where it fails is after Mr. Reed has the girls choose between two doors that each lead down to the creepy horror-movie basement. There we are introduced to a fourth central character, a “prophet”—decrepit, silent; she is killed and supposedly resurrected. Here the movie fully departs from its stage-play beginnings and devolves into blue-filtered cliché, with stabbing, throat-cutting, captive women in a subterranean labrynth, and some out-of-nowhere talk of life being a “simulation.” Also, Sister Paxton, set up as the more naïve of the pair, undergoes the kind of manipulation of character that happens only in fiction: she suddenly is resourceful, knowing, an unexpected “final girl.”

Heretic coasts on the strength of its first hour and excellent performances by the main trio of actors, especially Grant. Though press says he “plays against type,” he started doing that a long time ago. It’s been a decade or two since he was the floppy-haired nice guy. It’s a great performance, fun to watch, but not revelatory.

While Heretic does nosedive after the first act, it’s at least entertaining and watchable—but, alas, also not revelatory.