There’s something off about Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’s Heretic, something rotten at its pit that leaves the film feeling macabre in its subtext in a way that feels unintentional.
The film follows two young women, Mormon missionaries Sister Paxton (Chloe East) and Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) as they visit the home of Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant). Mr. Reed asked for the visit after signing up to learn more about Mormonism, but when the girls arrive at his home in an effort to spread the good word, they find that they cannot leave. Mr. Reed gerrymanders the conversation, where it becomes apparent that he already knows all about their faith, as the audience has the realization that he called the girls over not because he was curious about converting, but to explain to them why their beliefs are not only wrong, but harmful. The girls become antsy under his onslaught, down-right terrified once they find themselves in a strange theological game of wits with the man, who leads them deeper and deeper into his home, and thus deeper and deeper into his arguments about why Christianity is epistemologically bankrupt. With their lives at stake, the two young women desperately work to figure out how they can outsmart Mr. Reed in his own home, playing helplessly within a game of cat and mouse they did not sign up for.
Grant is a marvel in this film, turning his trademark, bumbling charm on its head to lend it the sinister sheen of a man who knows more than he is letting on. Mr. Reed plays a god of sorts in this film, crafting a maze for Sister Paxton and Sister Barnes, and watching them maniacally try to figure out its rules. As he delivers argument upon argument for why mainstream religions, especially Mormonism, have been wrong about most things, he never manages to become annoying or aggravating in the way that most personalities who I have encountered who are very anti-religion are. Grant’s Mr. Reed isn’t an Internet atheist so much as he is a sinister Socrates, or Old Testament god, taking pains to teach his involuntary pupils, and lashing out at them fatally if they don’t follow his plainly-laid-out rules.
Heretic is a fun watch for Grant’s devilishly enigmatic performance — he so mesmerizing as he conceals his creep behind that self-effacing grin that here lasts a beat too long, those shyly tripping pauses and uhs that here seem only perfunctory — and the film allows him to romp through his labyrinthine home with lordly gusto, watching him with a mesmerized admiration as he lays out the impassioned case against mainstream religions. My unease with the film lies in what it ends up telegraphing through the power dynamic it lays out, and the attitude it takes toward the young women who serve as our guides through Mr. Reed’s inferno. This film works as a jubilantly irreverent exploration of a new breed of villain, and as such, it does an injustice to the killer’s victims.
Though they certainly wield a measure of power above other marginalized folks, women in Mormonism exist within a hugely patriarchal structure and religion. In the first moments of Heretic, Sister Paxton is very publicly humiliated: she is ogled at, objectified, and then pantsed by a gaggle of young girls. Thus begins the theme of disempowerment, a tenor that crescendos throughout the film.
Once trapped within his home, Sister Barnes tries time and again to stand up to Mr. Reed. She realizes that playing intellectual mind games with him might delay whatever sadistic plan he has in place for them, a survival tactic she’s figured out within this trap. Mr. Reed scans as an internet troll wanting to humiliate any religious person, and his prime target are two vulnerable women who want nothing more than to leave the grips of the discussion he has foisted upon him.
This is not to say that Beck and Woods are using the character as their mouthpiece; their depiction here is not endorsement. Mr. Reed is meant to be creepy and the Sisters, as positioned by the script, are rightly irked by him. That being said, the lack of push-back allowed to the sisters while in Mr. Reed’s mind-maze leaves much to be desired. Sister Barnes is incredibly intelligent, she knows a great deal about many religions and about Mormonism itself, and while the girls do try to fight back, much of the first two acts of the film don’t feel so much as a discussion as an unabating lecture. Time and again, there were moments when I wished that the girls would interject in the conversation, throw Mr. Reeds’s words back at him in the way we expect of cat-and-mouse thrillers, where both cat and mouse torture each other equally. But the power dynamic that this film lays out is much more in line with traditional slasher films, where the killer endlessly outsmarts his victims, who are always on the defensive, never managing to finagle an upper hand, even if for a moment.
The script seems to understand that the Sisters, as two defenseless women, are terrified for their lives in the face of this man who lords his intellect over them. As Sister Barnes tries to engage in intellectual combat with the man — not as much as I would like, her attempts seem feeble especially in the face of the intellect we know she possesses, but engagement nonetheless — Sister Paxton takes the route of flattering the killer. It’s a tactic familiar to any woman who has ever tried to safely escape the grips of a man without wounding his ego, lest he snap. Time and again, Sister Paxton says that Mr. Reeds’ hospitality has been lovely, but they really should get going. Audiences at my screening laughed every time she employed this tactic, it was a laugh whose mocking tone suggested a literal understanding of Sister Paxton’s words, not grasping their obvious subtext. It was a laugh that left me feeling indignant. The film, even as it understands how these women would try to survive, also manages to cast their attempts at survival as feebly ridiculous, abandoning them under a mystifying glare, nearly working to humiliate them alongside Mr. Reed.
Even as the film positions Mr. Reed as a novel bad guy, it also seems to take too much pleasure in his torturing of the girls. All his intellectual wins are delivered with the pomp and circumstance of a mic drop, as though the women he is speaking with are the representatives of all religion, even their own, as though they were Joseph Smith himself, and not just young missionaries spreading the word of a religion that has a lot of trouble in treating women fairly; while Sister Barnes’s few retorts are muted in tone and breadth, and fall flat in the face of a gaze that seems eager to get back to Mr. Reeds’ oration. The bulk of the film is his torture — literal and intellectual — of these women, and by the time they fight back in earnest, it feels slap-dash, harried and hurried. Heretic, as it stands, feels like a great first draft, I just wish the filmmakers would have taken a second pass over it, with special focus paid to its framing of its female “victims,” to offer us scintillating and modern final girls.
