From the minds of Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, Heretic starts strong, cooking up a tension-filled thriller with a faith-based twist, but halfway through, the recipe seems to fall apart. The setup is solid, with a well-calibrated blend of tension and Hugh Grant’s unsettlingly disarming charm. But for all its ambition, the film bites off more than it’s willing to chew, delivering theological debates without the promised payoff. Heretic sets the stage for a wickedly clever horror thriller but loses its nerve right as things get interesting.
“Heretic sets the stage for a wickedly clever horror thriller but loses its nerve right as things get interesting.”
The story follows two Mormon missionaries, Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Paxton (Chloe East), who arrive at the foreboding home of Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant), a reclusive Englishman with a peculiar interest in religion and a suspicious blueberry pie aroma wafting through his candlelit lair. From the moment they enter, the air is thick with uneasy charm, especially as Reed delivers a series of increasingly strange observations on faith and belief, steadily pushing boundaries. It’s not long before the missionaries realize they’re locked in, isolated, and trapped in a high-stakes theological cat-and-mouse game that Reed has orchestrated.
The initial tension works, and the movie leans into the awkward clash between the girls’ soft-spoken manner and Reed’s unnervingly cordial menace. Grant’s Reed is both charming and sinister, making his turn from quirky host to outright predator as smooth as it is unsettling. Yet despite Thatcher and East’s best efforts, Barnes and Paxton feel a bit undercooked as characters—quiet, passive, and lacking the grit to root for them when things go south. They’re put through the wringer, but rather than rising to the occasion and earning triumph (or falling to tragedy), they seem to stumble through the plot with sudden leaps of logic that come out of nowhere, jumping way ahead of what’s been laid out in the story so far.
Once the duo steps deeper into Reed’s house of twisted “truths,” the film veers into surreal horror territory. Reed is all in, claiming he’s revealed a grand truth to the girls—something he expects to shake their worldview entirely. Yet when Barnes begins to see through the illusion, Reed’s intellectual menace fizzles, and instead of delivering a profound revelation, the story relies on a string of disconnected twists that don’t hold up to scrutiny. It’s here that Heretic begins its downward spiral, as the film drifts from intrigue into a series of pseudo-philosophical explanations, leapfrogging desperately from one to the next, and ultimately backtracking on the heady themes it initially set up.
On a technical level, the setting and cinematography deserve a nod; Reed’s house, with its dim rooms and endless corridors, captures that claustrophobic, “escape room at grandpa’s house” feel. The aesthetic is on point, and some practical effects around the setting are suitably jarring, hinting at the potential Heretic had if it had stuck the landing. But rather than a crescendo of revelations, the third act feels like it’s improvising without conviction, ending up neither terrifying nor thought-provoking. What’s beyond the doors—this promised truth that Reed sells so confidently—turns out to be more fog machine than fire, and when the movie tries to wrap it up, it’s clear the filmmakers might’ve edited their own thesis out of the story.
“…despite Hugh Grant’s standout performance, [Heretic] feels like a theological debate that cuts to commercial before the final argument”
Heretic has all the ingredients for a thought-provoking horror-thriller with an unsettling edge, but despite Hugh Grant’s standout performance, it feels like a theological debate that cuts to commercial before the final argument. The premise is tantalizing, the setup is fun, but ultimately, we’re left wandering a maze that doesn’t actually have a Sphinx telling riddles at its center.
Heretic is in theatres now. Let us know your thoughts over in the Nightmare on Film Street community over on Discord!
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