With a very positive score of 71 on the review aggr­e­gation site Metacritic — 43 positive, four mixed and two negative — one may believe that the A24 release Heretic may well be a triumph in the contained-thriller/ horror genre.

Well, given how the world works, one may believe anything they want, which is, kind of, also the going premise in the screenplay by directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (they wrote A Quiet Place and directed 65).

Mr Reed (Hugh Grant), seemingly a genial British gent living in an unnamed mountain-view town in America (the film is shot in Canada, by the way), has expressed interest in the Mormon religion, so the local branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sends two of their bright young girls, Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton (Sophie Thatcher, Chloe East), to help ease him into conversion.

The girls, standing out in the bleak rainy weather that would soon turn into snowfall, at first do not enter Mr Reed’s house unless a woman is present — and there is: a Mrs Reed who is baking a blueberry pie.

Heretic is far from fabulous but one can see the charm of the film, thanks in no small part to Hugh Grant’s performance

There is a woman, but perhaps not the Mrs Reed that was promised, and the smell of the pie, the girls figure out, is coming from the candles — but by then, as it happens in all horror films featuring young women, it is too late. The door has been locked with a timer that would unbolt by morning, and Mr Reed’s genial nature creepingly warps into that of a human devil — a role Grant is having fun playing, and one the world thinks he hasn’t really done before.

It is, but then again, it is not.

Heretic is not Grant’s first foray into evil — see: Paddington 2; Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Amongst Thieves; the critically acclaimed HBO show The Undoing; the hardly-watched Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre. Heck, one can even count him as the antagonist in the Bridget Jones movies.

So, it’s not as if the actor has not done a film as a man with evil intent. If you ask this reviewer, there has always been something in his mesmerising, shiny blue eyes that glinted malice, if used right. As it happens, Beck and Woods saw the exact potential of the unholy in Grant’s baby blues.

Grant’s Reed augments other minor positives of Heretic, such as the limited sets, the production design and the story — which, in this case, is also a con (the story is wafer-thin) — and the performances from Thatcher and East. The whip-smartness of the sound design, the cinematography and editing are other pluses (the last two credits go to Chung Chung-hoon and Justin Li), as are the deliberate stay-aways from blood, gore and jump-scares.

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But, despite the well-packaging of these individual ingredients, the soul of and the logic running through the story feels half-baked and unexplored, other than the few conversations Reed has with the young Mormon girls, and the open-ended closing shots of the film.

Heretic is far from fabulous, but one can see the charm of the film — thanks in no small part to Grant. It might well be counted as a good-enough film, though not the saviour of the horror genre most reviews make it out to be.

Released by A24, Heretic is playing worldwide with an age-appropriate R rating, and gives young missionary women the message to not trust kindly old British gentlemen

Published in Dawn, ICON, November 24th, 2024