HERETIC Believes in Intelligent Bad Guys

The faith isn’t particularly convincing.

Silence of the Lambs and the Saw franchise have established the malevolent-genius-hectors-on-endlessly-while-manipulating-victims-in-a-sadistic-game as a bafflingly popular slasher subgenre. Heretic is the latest variation. It is briefly ennobled by the genius of Hugh Grant, who twists his unmatchable charm into a distinctive and effective nice-guy creepiness. But the power of that performance can only take a film so far, and soon enough we are back with the genre tropes of endless hectoring and improbable manipulation—first by the bad guy, but even more egregiously by ham-fisted directing duo Scott Beck and Bryan Woods.

The set up for all this hectoring and manipulating is a Mormon mission. Young, eager prosleytizers Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East) visit an elderly heathen, Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant), who has expressed interest in receiving literature from the Church of Latter Day Saints. Reed initially promises them blueberry pie and a sympathetic ear, but soon he’s asking them about polygamy in the Church, explaining that he can’t unlock the front door because it’s on a timer, and locking them in a dungeon, more or less in that order.

As is generally the case with these things, the plot is an exercise in increasingly improbable twists, but the core of the film (to the extent one exists) is the theological back and forth about faith or the lack thereof. The initial point seems to be that egotistical male atheists can be every bit as misogynist and sadistic as religious leaders. This is certainly true and worth pointing out, as far as it goes. But is it really enough of a moral on which to hang an entire 111-minute film?

The answer is “not really.” So we get a lot of wheel spinning and filibustering as Reed babbles on about the history of Monopoly and rights disputes about Radiohead’s “Creep.” Eventually, he gets around to explaining that religions are just a form of social control, and/or that the one true religion is control.

This may or may not describe Mormonism, but it’s certainly on the money as far as the subgenre and the movie itself are concerned. Reed is essentially a stand in for the director, telling Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton where to stand, what room to go to next, what emotions to express, even what lines to utter.

You’re supposed to find this disturbing or see it as a critique of religion and/or of male sadism. But it’s hard to miss the ways in which the film reproduces the dynamics it’s supposedly shaking its finger at. You’re rooting for the sisters, of course, but you’re also supposed to think that the film, and by extension Reed, is clever and badass for the way it sends the protagonists down this corner and backs them into that theological dead end. It doesn’t help that the film concludes with a gauntlet of improbable (but not unpredictable) wriggles, all meant to show the director’s cunning and cleverness even as they actually demonstrate the opposite.

The problem with this whole hectoring subgenre is that evil just is not that clever, and does not need to be. Donald Trump is a fool who doesn’t know how tariffs work; Adolf Hitler was a butthead who thought invading Russia in winter was a good idea; Joseph Stalin thought an alliance with Hitler was a clever strategy; Benjamin Netanyahu ignored repeated warnings about a Hamas attack on 10/7. Etc. etc. You don’t need to be some sort of supergenius to kill and torture people. You just need to be an asshole and a liar and have the luck and privilege to get some power so you can murder people with impunity.

Maybe that’s the appeal of these films for some; we like to think that evil people are charming and clever; we want to believe that the people who hurt us have to work at it. But they don’t, and I think building up our villains in this way makes it difficult to recognize the dunderheaded, mundane malevolences we deal with on a day-to-day basis. Heretic pretends it’s cynical, but too much faith in cynicism can leave you even more gullible, reverent, and vulnerable than the sisters you set up to knock on the wrong door.