Don't stop believing

HERETIC

2024

Written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods

Spoilers: moderate

Heretic has a pretty simple hook, and I think to spell it out would come close to summarizing the whole movie without having any parts left over: what if Saw was significantly less overtly violent, and instead of having a killer eager to teach some nebulous moral lessons about how you're wasting your life, it had a killer who was eager to have a whole symposium about the very sharply-defined moral lessons he wants to teach, regarding how you're wasting your life by, specifically, believing in God; I imagine that someone more terminally online than I might describe it, "what if Jigsaw were a big poster on r/atheism," and I'll let you let me know if I'm using those words right or not.  If we did want to be entirely complete, however, we'd add that it was militant atheist Saw by way of A24 style—not that it would necessarily matter because A24 is more of a subgenre these days, but the company did distribute it—though with the caveat that, given that it's happily not as dismally and miserably "emotional" as that implies, when I call it "A24 style," I just mean the style, which is to say, what people who aren't nearly as good as Wes Anderson, but wish Wes Anderson made horror movies, would make in pursuit of that goal.  (Playing out a scene underneath it takes some of it away immediately, and an inability to use deep focus takes pretty much all of it away as soon as we find some interiors, but Heretic does have some opening credits that are remarkably Andersonian.)  We do, anyway, have all the brand's iconography: from as big as the utilization of a miniature version of the setting that might as well be a dollhouse, which will look "cool" and can be used in the marketing, to as small as a loop-de-loop shot, that puts the imagery upside down, and isn't that all wrong and horrifying; likewise, and more persistently, we have the kind of cinematography that dictates that even when a room has four visible onscreen lamps illuminating it, not to even speak of one larger window and another smaller one (plus it's daytime), it's going to be extraordinarily dim and hushed; and if you'll allow me a little facetiousness, it's a movie with that starts with the letters "h," "e," "r," and "e," although I'm just off on a spurious goof now, since I don't think that's on purpose, and the words aren't even related (Hereditary is Latin-derived, while Heretic is Greek).  Though maybe it would be on-target to note that Heretic, the big smart intellectual horror movie, doesn't seem to know what the word in its title means, given that, properly speaking, it's rather more an "apostate" whom we get than a "heretic."

I don't want to be too down on it from the outset, though; in fact, I think it starts quite well.  So let's meet our heroines, who, according to the majoritarian form of Christianity whose theology had its outer boundaries firmly established about sixteen hundred years ago in Asia Minor, would be the figures more aptly described as "heretics" here.  These are a pair of young Mormon missionaries, Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Paxton (Chloe East), who are fulfilling their duties to their church by running down a few leads for converts, and, as fate would have it, one of those leads is a certain Mister Reed (Hugh Grant).  (The actual plot, then, is a bit more The Human Centipede than Saw; yet in either case—and even if such a comparison would overpromise on the severity of the content—what we have is definitively a throwback to 00s torture porn.)  They are invited into Reed's home and out of the rainstorm that's kicked up, and they accept his invitation based on the promise that there's a "wife" somewhere in his oddly-built fastness "baking" a "blueberry pie."  Rather than any delicious pie, unfortunately, the two girls are instead to have their faith tested by an affably buttoned-down maniac who keeps asking them whether they believe, and keeps telling them that the correct answer is "no," although, as Barnes has determined some time before she tells her missionary colleague, it probably doesn't matter what answer they give.

That's the long version, and there is not any longer version of the movie that writer-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods made here that wouldn't just be a scene-by-scene recitation of their film; yet I won't even say, as I usually would, that 111 minutes was too many minutes for that to play out, even if, in the way the plot's actually arranged within these 111 minutes, I think that this is a more-or-less objective fact.  But I did, after all, want to begin with the compliments: frankly, it is a pretty neat idea to take a 00s torture porn and redeploy its structure on behalf of a villain who, actually, isn't very interested in torture per se, and barely uses avowed violence at all (for about 80% of the movie, you only have false imprisonment, itself effected mostly by Reed's timelock mechanism on his front door and Reed not being very forthcoming about how to get out of the labyrinthine subterranean stretches of his home, and only occasionally by even arraying himself as a physical obstacle in his own right); instead, he just wants to annoy the missionaries who have annoyed him, albeit in a hugely disproportionate way that likewise takes full advantage of the fact that he's a grown man in his own creepy house and they're teenaged girls with barely any worldliness about them, what worldliness they have being concentrated in just the one of them.  That creepy house is excellent stuff, too: production designer Phillip Messina, art director Justin Ludwig, and set decorator Hamish Purdy have gone right to the limit of what still plausibly reads (at least in the public-facing rooms) as the homey, if not-quite-friendly abode of a self-taught scholar, while still having a lot off about it (the fortress-like exterior walls with their slit windows, for instance, or the abominably ugly ways the walls fit together in his library—for that matter, the noticeable absence of any normal person media devices, like a TV or even a computer), and keeping it the ready subject of grim lighting conditions and camera angles from our (as we'll eventually find) overqualified DP, Chung Chung-hoon.

The performances are just as strong, and not even just from Grant—he's obviously the show, but he probably has the easiest job of the cast, having a dynamite time delivering a collection of diatribes, thought experiments, and chummily-presented factoids, but ultimately serving as such a collection of smug leers that virtually any given close-up feels like it's being pitched as a meme template—so that I'm probably more impressed with the younger actors, who stake out very distinct personalities for their stereotypes, and even layers within those personalities.  (The actual MVP, I think, is very clearly East, who does this with her outwardly-mousy Mormon before the end of her first dialogue exchange with Thatcher, by dint of the clumsy way she overcorrects her pronunciation of the word "pornographic," and she seals it with her practiced squeaky baby voice, not to mention the way she almost trips over her own eagerness to apostasize and declare God dead if it means she just gets to leave this damned house.)  Heretic never completely faceplants—not, anyway, before the very end (and sure, sometimes you have to accord horror movies, or thrillers, the privilege of having a shitty ending, but this one's shitty ending is entirely unforced), and it never gets boring—but it does disappoint, because the first, let's say, half of Heretic pays off remarkably well on its promise of a pop intellectual thriller where the prospect of incipient violence keeps three people who shouldn't still be in any room together in these rooms together.

This is where Grant "being the show" is at its most rewarding—very gradually revealing his sinister intentions, poking playfully at his victims a half-dozen times before finally pouncing, and before that more-or-less literally shaking his head at their naivete—and, not coincidentally, it's where the script is strongest and actually doing what it wants, basically just a lot of militant atheist rambling that deploys visual aids to make an amusing case for the artificiality of organized religion as it currently exists, and, blurring the line between atheist and mystic for Reed, that if there genuinely is some higher power that it's been obscured by eons of self-interested priests and prophets seeking an excuse for their authority.  It even has the wisdom to know when to break into Reed's militant atheist rambling to point out that a lot of what he's saying isn't nearly as smart or erudite as he thinks it is.  (As far as its "religious studies" bona fides go, it's more important for it to be fun than deep, I'd say, though it can get a little irritating: it recognizes that referring to the comparatively small number of Jews in the world to make a point about proselytizing religion is a cheap shot—the Jewish-Roman Wars, persecution, pogroms, and the Holocaust, after all—but you'd think a big religious scholar would also concede that Judaism did have a proselytizing wing once, one of the first examples of a universalizing religion in history, and they called it Christianity; around the same time, it executes a very enjoyable gag at Mormonism's expense*, via those amusing visual aids I mentioned, but it gets startlingly little mileage out of the enormously distinct cosmology that Joseph Smith had revealed to him, something that wouldn't necessarily be that startling—because really all the movie requires are "religious people who actually go door-to-door," so that left very few options—until Reed also drifts into a discursion upon simulation theory,** yet there's no sense that this is anything but a coincidence, or that anybody knows enough about Mormonism to recall that Mormon cosmology basically is that, "planets" and Gods potentially stacked atop one another indefinitely.)

Still, it's a modest blast, right up until it sort of... runs out of ideas, or, more accurately, it reluctantly accepts that it's selling itself as a commercial horror movie and commercial horror movies can't just be No Exit with a chipper know-it-all.  I don't even begrudge it that, but it's very obviously so much less enthusiastic about the more generic phase that begins once they leave the above-ground levels of Reed's house.  For one thing, and it's the most basic and most stultifying problem the movie has, we leave the reasonably well-appointed filmmaking of the first hour and the movie more-or-less announces that although you may well have enjoyed overqualified DP Chung Chung-hoon bringing an uncommon sensitivity to the 2020s horror movie aesthetics without quite escaping those aesthetic's clutches, the next hour is going to be two people wandering around a series of featureless black dungeons, and even if it's going to be a "better" version of underlit murk—and it is!—it is, still, going to be very nearly a solid hour of underlit murk, so deal with that, why don't you, motherfucker.

It is likewise the case that Heretic sees a need to start "punching up" its thrills, along with its horror-based arguments for atheism, and practically all of the notions it has for doing this are bad, and worse than just being bad, they're desperately spitballed.  For instance, there's a structural surprise that "plays," in the sense that I was definitely surprised, but I don't think the movie benefits very much from it; more concretely, the movie gets way fucking dumber, and while it was obviously already trying to intellectually punch above its weight, the second half means that I could no longer be entirely shocked to discover that the writer-directors of Heretic were the co-writers of A Quiet Place, possibly the stupidest Goddamn major horror flick of the 21st century.  (Also, I was just reminded, 65.  Egads.)  It's at least not so teeth-grindingly bad as either, and the comparative dumbness of Heretic can be summed up, perhaps, by reminding you that the writers of A Quiet Place posited (amongst many other dumb things) a thirty minute silent childbirth, while the writers of Heretic merely posit, in a similar vein, only the belief that etonogestrel birth control implants are 1)metallic, like an alien implant from The X-Files and 2)situated deeply inside the flesh of your triceps, and I have to admit, this does represent some kind of improvement, inasmuch as the latter is "I didn't look it up and it's not that important a detail" while the former is "it's baffling that anyone who'd ever existed in human society for even a few weeks could have ever thought it was plausible."

Above all, however, while it's been a vague sensation since jump street, as we move into what amounts to act two of two-act film, that sensation gets stronger and stronger till it's unignorable: everything in this movie only exists in order for this movie to happen exactly the way it does.  And, yes, that's true of every fiction, but Heretic isn't doing anything to hide it: Barnes and Paxton exist only to get trapped; Reed exists to build a trap specifically for them; and eventually I guess there's a series of halfhearted implications that "explains" this, though they only have the effect of making Reed's purpose and methods incredibly pointless, and much less the cruelty of a man who wants to convince you that your most deeply held beliefs are nonsense, and more just what someone does in any given horror movie.  Yet while that's where the movie stops being interesting, the sensation that everything is just a whim of its screenwriters is at its worst in the dialogue, because even when it's been "good" or "smart," there's never been any getting away from how this screenplay blatantly exists solely to serve as a vehicle for showing off whatever idea about religion was next on Woods and Beck's not-especially-well-organized list; perversely, that's even one of the main ways I'm so impressed with East and Thatcher, because that work of etching out and maintaining distinctive, plausible personalities must've been incredibly hard against this script, especially once East effectively has to start playing Thatcher's character (or possibly even Grant's) instead of her own, erupting almost unprompted with factoids of her own, or when Thatcher is obliged to drop, on behalf of her teenaged character, a big ol' "and your rhetoric is thin" bomb on Grant's head.  I don't believe it counts as a spoiler to suggest that, in the end, the movie plays it down the middle with a sort of humanistic take on religion; and that's nice, but I don't know if I want "niceness" in my horror movies.  Honestly, I'd have respected it more if it'd gone to one of either extreme, and been howlingly nihilistic, or full-on religious propaganda, or a 21st century-set, Mormon version of The Robe.  Plus, and maybe it's not that important, but Mormons don't believe in reincarnation; I mean, goodness gracious.

Score: 5/10

*Also Islam's, though the real laugh-out-loud joke in this phase of the screenplay is a terrific Star Wars reference.

**But I don't want to spoil possibly the single best line in the film and Grant's best read.