Ever had Jesus freaks come to your door and try to convert you? If you have, you may feel surprisingly more empathy for the antagonist of Heretic than you’d expect.
As writers, Scott Beck and Bryan Woods are best remembered for A Quiet Place, the radical structure and brilliant, dialogue-free conceit of which made them talents to watch. But there’s a been lot less to compliment about their work as directors. 2015’s Nightlight had another bright idea (“found footage, but from the POV of a torch”) but was a charmless Scooby-Doo rehash, while “Adam Driver versus dinosaurs” sounded like a great elevator pitch, but resulted in the lumpen 65. But here, for the first time in their careers, they may be better directors than writers – and considering what a twisty, wry, and menacing pleasure Heretic’s script is, that’s saying something.
After all, it’s such a small premise – two Mormons visit a man who challenges them to defend their faith – that it demands storytelling creativity that’s more than jump scares and spooky angles. Instead, this is initially a performance-driven piece, with the sullen Sister Barnes (Thatcher, Yellowjackets, Prospect) and her blithely innocent best friend, Sister Paxton (East, The Fabelmans, The Wolf of Snow Hollow) miserably failing to match wits with the affable and welcoming Mr. Reed (Grant).
The glee with which Grant – erudite and menacing – rips through Reed’s speeches is intoxicating. In one sermon, he presents a grand unification theory of faith that pulls in medieval mysticism, the Torah, Hokusai’s “The Great Wave off Kanagawa,” Monopoly, and Radiohead’s plagiarism lawsuit: Honestly, it may be the best pop philosophy lecture in a movie since Morpheus handheld audiences through existentialism for beginners in The Matrix. Not only is it Beck and Woods at their best as writers, but Grant clearly relishes the opportunity to show a new side to himself. Finally shedding the shackles of his post-Four Weddings and a Funeral bumbling-but-harmless persona, in recent years he’s gone down a more roguish route with Paddington 2 and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (his surly Oompa Loompa was arguably the best part of the sickly and sickening Wonka). But he’s never been malevolent before, and even if Reed turns out to be a harmless intellectual crank, he’s brilliantly unnerving. Thatcher (who previously starred in the Beck-and-Woods-penned Stephen King adaptation, The Boogeyman) plays Barnes as the doubting Thomas, and it’s made clear that she’s only able to spar with Reed because she’s already thought about his critiques. But the richer performance comes from East, who finds far more to the part than the traditional church mouse, and somehow dominates scenes even as Paxton shrinks into her seat and fumbles her words.
Yet Hollywood loathes a moral vacuum, and so Heretic finally has to decide to be a chamber piece or a horror movie. It’s not that the choice it makes is disappointing, it’s the very act of selection that lets the film down. Up to a certain point in the script, it’s easy to see how Reed could be hero or villain – or at least for the story to encircle both. When Heretic does settle on its own reality, it’s always going to be a disappointment, even if it’s inevitable (the recent failures of The Front Room and Joker: Folie à Deux show how allergic audiences are to ambiguity). Fortunately, as directors Beck and Woods have become deviously adept at giving the audience what they want – rock-solid scares.
This article appears in November 8 • 2024.