‘Heretic’ Review – Hugh Grant’s Deranged Run Continues With An Uneven Biblical Horror Romp [TIFF 2024]

While Hugh Grant has certainly never played a role quite like the sick freak he plays in Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’ ever-entertaining, albeit overlong horror romp, Heretic, it is funny to see so many people opining that this is the first time the British icon has ever strayed away from type. In fact, for the better part of the last decade, all Grant has done is experiment. In 2012, he played six different, increasingly odd characters in Cloud Atlas. While he returned to his dramatic and romantic roots for a few parts over the next few years, playing desirable lads in 2014’s The Rewrite and 2016’s Florence Foster Jenkins, he went wacky in 2018 as Paddington 2’s villain, Phoenix Buchanan. It was a role that allowed him the opportunity not just to be funny – something his rom-com leads have all been capable of, despite the charm their humor was invariably infused with – but deranged. In many ways, Buchanan is an adult version of Timothée Chalamet’s rendition of Willy Wonka turned sinister: kooky, peculiar, and greedy.

Speaking of Wonka, Grant appeared in that, too, as “Oompa-Loompa.” He looked like he hated that role, or at least that’s how it seemed in his interviews, particularly when he talked about it in French. Regardless, it was another swing for an actor who spent the first 20-plus years of his career in films where Julia Roberts would play a girl standing in front of a boy asking him to love her, or where Bridget Jones would repeatedly muse about him in her diary, or where he was a Prime Minister pining after an aid, or where Drew Barrymore helped his washed-up pop star character write a song for a Justin Bieber-esque teen sensation. After falling in love with practically every A-List actress his agents could get their hands on, perhaps Grant was sick of the same old schtick and wanted to inhabit the role of a very silly private detective, or a murderous oncologist in an HBO miniseries, or Benoit Blanc’s life partner, or a con artist turned Lord in a movie based on a fantasy role-playing game, or a dude who dresses up like Tony the Tiger for cereal ads. Frankly, who can blame him?

What I tend to think people mean to say about Hugh Grant’s turn in Heretic is not that it’s his first-ever bonkers effort, but that it’s a wholly different kind of bonkers effort. If that is the case, they’d be right: As Mr. Reed, a mysterious man who lets two unassuming teenage Mormon missionaries into his mysterious house to tell him about their (mysterious) Lord and savior, he’s the terrifying amalgamation of his wildest characters and your creepy neighbor, the guy whose lights always seem to be off and has all of the neighborhood kids convinced that his wife is buried in the backyard. It’s difficult to say anything about Heretic from there, because every spoiler-y thing in Heretic happens from there. Let’s just say, very generally, that within the first 10 minutes of the movie, it’s apparent that these poor girls knocked on the wrong door. In other words, they knocked on the door of a guy who wants two missionaries to enter his home, and not so that he can entertain their pitch to join The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

No, what Mr. Reed wants from Sister Paxton (Chloe East) and Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) is an opportunity, one that he takes in spades the second they agree to wait in his living room for his wife’s blueberry pie to pop out of the oven. An opportunity, that is, to test them on whether or not their whole “God” thing stacks up against the things he has on his mind. He responds to questions about his history with religion with questions of his own, like “How do you feel about polygamy?” and “Are you familiar with ‘Monopoly?’” He implies that the existence of the Bible led to the invention of Jar Jar Binks. He invokes the copyright infringement case involving Radiohead and “The Air That I Breathe” by the Hollies, before singing a few lines from “Creep” while impersonating Thom Yorke. As a matter of fact, thank the good Lord above that these born-again sisters happened to stroll up to Grant’s doorstep; without their misfortune, we wouldn’t have Grant’s madcap showcase, one that is, indeed, unlike any of his performances to date. 

If only more of the brainpower that went into creating Mr. Reed and all of his eccentricities went into crafting Heretic’s overall conceit, which essentially boils down to “something is wrong with this guy and his house.” That pie-baking wife? Yeah, she keeps getting mentioned, but where exactly is she? A woman is required to be in the room if a female missionary is in someone’s home; shouldn’t her pies be burnt by now? That the audience becomes more wary of her existence – or lack thereof… I shan’t say – long before the girls do should tell you all you need to know. Then again, that the saintly sisters are all too eager to believe just about everything they hear is precisely the point Reed wishes to drive home once he gets the girls to join him in his study, which looks a whole lot like if a serial killer designed a Sunday School classroom. (Philip Messina, the film’s production designer, is decidedly not a serial killer. Just a genius.) Paxton and Barnes have been raised to have faith in what they’ve been taught; what Reed argues is that they haven’t been learning, but being controlled.

It’s a clever enough idea to skewer, and much of the film’s excellent midsection is dedicated to Reed doing exactly that in spades. That the overlong back half essentially turns into Barbarian (in that there’s a basement) by way of Insert Name of Religious Horror Property here (in that it recycles the same scary beats over and over again) isn’t as detracting as it might be in, well, Insert Name of Religious Horror Property. But it’s indicative of a frustrating trend, not just in mainstream horror – a genre that eats its own tail more often than it provides audiences a satisfactory meal – but in the cinema of Beck and Woods. The filmmaking duo behind the script for A Quiet Place has struggled to maintain even a halfway decent output in recent years, managing to release two stinkers in just months apart in 2023, writing and directing the Adam Driver sci-fi vehicle 65 and writing Rob Savage’s The Boogeyman. Calling Heretic their best fully-helmed film might not inspire too much confidence given the track record, but it can be said with confidence that their latest feels like a significant step up, almost as though they worked through a slump right to what could be a true, original hit. 

It helps that Heretic is chattier than just about any film to have been released so far this year, which could be why it feels like it’s operating at a breakneck pace for most of its runtime. While Grant handily wins the movie’s words-per-minute crown, both East and Thatcher deserve their own paragraphs in his victory speech. Not only do they both make for great final girls, but they work off of one another remarkably well. Thatcher’s Sister Barnes, brought to life with mature intensity, originally looks to be the brains of their operation – the one who is contemplative in her silence – but the more time we spend with East’s Sister Paxton, the more we come to realize that her manner of surveying the situation is through speech. East hilariously plays her missionary as an uber-innocent young woman who can’t begin to imagine why anyone would want to watch pornography and isn’t convinced that penises fit Magnum condoms. (She talks about far more than her sexual curiosities, but these observations coming in the film’s first two minutes set a nice pace for its lasting demeanor.)

This is all to say that it’s an incredibly silly movie, one that remains highly enjoyable despite letting itself off far too easily. It doesn’t have all that much to say about religious pretenses, even in its many attempts at breaking them down, nor does it have anything particularly new to offer the horror genre aside from its secondary conceits – that is, the design of Mr. Reed’s home, a few of the twists once we work our way into said home’s depths, and adding blueberry pie to the pantheon of foods not to be trusted. Too bad it was obvious from the moment Mr. Reed returned from “fetching the pie” holding a tray with nothing but a scented candle on it, all while commenting on how good that “blueberry pie” smells. Like everything else in Heretic, it’s not worth wasting too much mental stamina on, but turning the candle enough so that you can see what fragrance it’s giving off might save a few headaches. 

Heretic held its World Premiere as part of the Special Presentations section at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. The film will be released by A24 exclusively in theaters on November 15, 2024. 

Directors: Scott Beck, Bryan Woods

Writers: Scott Beck, Bryan Woods

Rated: NR

Runtime: 110m