Heretic Review – Religious Horror with a Sweet, Nice and Evil Hugh Grant | Film

Tthe remarkable second act of Hugh Grant’s career continues … or perhaps the third act, if we include the earlier period when he seemed to withdraw from the movie romcom-leading front line to concentrate on making brilliant investments in property and contemporary art, before returning as a deadly outrageous character actor and scene stealer. Now Grant makes his horror debut (if we don’t include his appearance in Ken Russell’s 1988 The Lair of the White Worm) and does so with typical unease and audacity, starring in a sprawling and unsettling chamber piece about religion from writer-director Scott Beck and Bryan Woods; it feels like George Bernard Shaw wanted to make a scary movie without songs inspired by the Book of Mormon.

Maturity and the chiller genre have added something to Grant’s usual mannerisms, on display as always here: the sudden mischievous grin and the wide-eyed conspiratorial “eek!” grimace of fake dismay. He plays a donnish and bespectacled Brit named Mr Reed who lives in the US in a remote, eccentrically proportioned house. Like Grant’s aging thespian Phoenix Buchanan in Paddington 2, this man is vain enough to keep an image of his younger self about the place. Mr. Reed has expressed an uneasy interest in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, so the Mormons have sent two missionaries around to discuss this with him; not straddling young men as would normally be the case in real life, non-horror movies, but two women in their twenties. It is the innocent sister Paxton (Chloe East) and the marginally more worldly sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) who, in the first scene, react with inexhaustible sisterly amusement as Paxton recounts her shock at accidentally watching a pornographic film and expresses her sincere belief that the female lead’s unsimulated expression of despair proves the need to live a godly life.

Mr. Reed is a paragon of avuncular kindness and quizzical hospitality when these two show up on his doorstep; he invites them in, the door clicks behind them, and offers blueberry pie. As Paxton and Thatcher politely inform Mr. Reed that they cannot be alone with him without another woman present, he kindly offers to bring his wife in from the kitchen. Paxton and Barnes eagerly accept, but there seems to be a strange and disconcerting delay in this wife actually appearing.

As for Mr. Reed, he seems strangely insistent on discussing the various forms of religion with them, his friendliness worryingly beginning to wane as the steely glint behind his glasses increases. With various entertaining props from popular culture, Mr. Reed talks about belief systems as iterations or theme variations of earlier pagan or mythic forms, and becomes petulant and thin-lipped when Barnes contradicts him. With hooded eyes, he asks these impeccably appearing young women if they still believe that his wife really exists in another space as he has assured them, and what exactly makes them believe that? A need to survive, perhaps in this world as well as the next? Heretic is gruesome and bizarre and absurd, the third aspect made palatable by Grant’s fine performance of evil.