Heretic: A Film Where Hugh Grant Does Everything He Does Best

By Chris Knight

Rating: A

Eighty-eight minutes. That’s how long before the first blood is drawn in Heretic, a knife-edge horror-thriller from co-writers and directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods. And the whole thing is just 110 minutes long. So, there’s rather a lot of violence, but it takes its sweet time arriving. By the time it does, it’s almost a relief.

The film opens with Mormon missionaries Sister Paxton (Chloe East) and Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) doing the good work of spreading the word. Right away, in their dress sense, mannerisms, and even the old cinematic shorthand of spectacles and hair colour, we sense that Paxton skews a little more innocent than her companion.

They knock on the door of Mr. Reed, a kindly man played by Hugh Grant. Grant is of course famous for playing a stuttering heartthrob in such 90s films as Notting Hill and Four Weddings and a Funeral. More recently he’s turned to portraying shadier types in Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen, the miniseries The Undoing, and more.

Read our interviews with Heretic’s directors and stars

All of which makes Mr. Reed the perfect part for this latter-day chameleon. He’s blueberry pie on the outside, faux-scented blueberry candle within. (This is also the women’s first inkling that something might be amiss, when he offers them dessert only to throw them off the scent of what he’s really up to.)

Mr. Reed seems at first to be a missionaries’ dream come true: friendly and open and already well-versed in theology. But as the visit stretches on (88 minutes, remember) he starts to seem like more of a mad game-show host, offering his guests odd explanations for why the front door will no longer open, and inviting them deeper into his abode where a back door awaits. Or rather, two back doors. Which will they choose, and what is the prize?

The film, which one could easily imagine as a play, is a three-hander, although Reed’s too-charming house feels like a fourth character in its own right. It’s decorated in mid-century creep, with too much wallpaper, not enough light, and some decidedly odd angles in the library. Or is it a chapel?

Once Paxton and Barnes are this far in, we sense (to quote Robert Frost, as Reed does) that the only way out is through. But the genial homeowner does seem to enjoy stretching things out, delivering a lengthy lecture on plagiarism of the song “The Air That I Breathe,” and another on the history of Monopoly, which dates back to the anti-monopolist Landlord’s Game.

He’s also conversant in Star Wars, though not so much comic books. He thinks the “with great power” line is Voltaire, not Spider-Man.

In many ways, the first four-fifths of the film function as a kind of treatise on the history of religious thinking, and the difficulty (some would say foolhardiness) of trying to define one religion as “true,” when in fact they all borrow heavily from one another, and from older myths and legends. Expect deep conversations to follow your screening.

I have heard complaints that the gory finale marks too much of a departure from the more sedate (though white-knucklingly tense) opening scenes, but for me the violence was cathartic. Grant perches his performance at such a keening high-pitch that at some point either it’s going to break, or we are. I’m happy the filmmakers chose to end the way it did.

Heretic. Directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods. Starring Hugh Grant, Chloe East, and Sophie Thatcher. In theatres November 8.