Hey, I’ve been producing sort of a backlog of reviews (by my count it’s Joker 2, Speak No Evil, Hit Pig, Anora, Saturday Night, and The Substance, in addition to Cuckoo which has been in draft purgatory for weeks). Things weren’t going great here and when things started to pile up it was easier not to write at all, but now that there’s a monster in my house who’s on week four of sleep strike, it feels pretty impossible to leave to see anything in theaters during prime viewing time, so maybe this natural slowdown is just part of a cycle and we’re evening out.
I wanted to start with Heretic because it’s the most recent thing I’ve seen, which makes it freshest, but also because there’s a few scenes in it that have stayed with me over the course of the week. As someone who has experienced nearly all of the literature I’ve consumed through intermediaries (Lord of the Rings: the movies, then the books, then the video game; Batman: through Gaiman; every other book: Wishbone and Reading Rainbow; Star Wars: the movies, then the Family Guy parodies, the fan cuts, the television shows), Hugh Grant describing the iterations of religions using board games is one of the most entertaining monologues of the year. The ways in which Sisters Paxton and Barnes (Chloe East and Sophie Thatcher) critique that monologue is so vividly conceived and raises the entire level of discourse for the film, which could’ve easily languished as pot smoke-filled dorm room musings, but catapults itself to a new level by invoking and provoking a dialogue. The script marked by highly self-referential dialogue, pop culture references, and a fixation with “iterations” feels like a spiritual talky successor to something like Pulp Fiction, which probably makes me sound like hipster trash, but I think that’s sort of the vibe we’re going for here — the movie is “all about the journey not the destination”. That’s to be expected from the scattershot quality of these directors’ previous works: the profoundly stupid 65 and groundbreaking A Quiet Place.
The cast is a powerful trifecta plus a puzzling Topher Grace cameo. Sophie Thatcher has been haunting the peripheries of my media consumption for some time now: Yellowjackets is her major breakout role followed by an extended series called When the Streetlights Go On, and a horror film called The Boogeyman, but she’s also played a fairly annoying Youth in the Book of Boba Fett for three episodes, and had a minor role in MaxXxine. Chloe East was a Disney star whose credentials extend to the vaunted halls of Spielberg and Netflix, but her performance in Heretic contains such range and fire. The two actresses are surprisingly both from Mormon backgrounds which makes the entire premise of the film even more entrancing: two Mormon missionaries are trapped by their would-be convert! The film is kind and protective toward faith, positioning the twee (SPOILER) atheist as the villain. It’s that softness and earnestness that makes the film such a weird surrogate experience of empathy for a couple of otherwise would-be outcasts (one of the first scenes is of a bunch of Gen Z girls pantsing our protagonist while making fun of her clothes).
Despite threatening a lot of terrifying gore, Heretic is fairly conservative on its use of gore and violence and isn’t at all interested, as Grant assures the girls, in threatening sexual violence of any sort. Scream queens aside, Grant himself delivers a lovely performance as villain. (Friend mentioned that this is his villain period after the Dungeons and Dragons movie.) And it certainly beats his uncanny performance in the otherwise flawless Wonka. Friend expressed open skepticism about what any of the motives of Hugh Grant are, and it sounds like the writers passed around hundreds of pages of backstory in establishing the premise for this otherwise pretty simple thriller in a black box, but it’s not entirely clear beyond “Bad Guy Has Elaborate Maze in his Basement,” even after having had a week to cogitate.
Like most A24 films, Heretic has a cool premise, one or two WTF moments, a twist, and some excellent music, and if that is what you go in expecting, you won’t be disappointed.
Here’s my hot take: I wish the movie leaned into the supernatural a little more. I kind of wanted Hugh Grant to have discovered a modern prophet and true religion, rather than the smoke/mirrors exposition-heavy ending we got.
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