At The Movies: In horror film Heretic, Hugh Grant makes niceness feel nightmarish
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British actor Hugh Grant plays a creepy home owner who traps two missionaries when they come knocking at his door in Heretic.
PHOTO: MM2 ENTERTAINMENT
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Heretic (NC16)
110 minutes, opens on Dec 12
★★★★☆
The story: Two Mormon missionaries, Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East), call at the home of Mr Reed (Hugh Grant), who claims to be interested in their religion. The women, to their horror, discover that they have walked into a carefully laid trap.
Grant’s Mr Reed is the ultimate Reddit bro. Smugly convinced of his mental superiority, he lays out rhetorical traps for which commenters on the Reddit forum are notorious. The two are young and female, and have faith in an unknowable entity – traits the bros despise.
The difference is that the debates are happening in real life, and his opponents are, in a literal sense, a captive audience.
Through increasingly tense conversations, Mr Reed mocks their Mormon beliefs. These escalate in intensity until the women fear for their lives. They have not only been kidnapped, but also been roped into a social experiment of some kind, with results that might prove fatal.
Writer-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods made their Hollywood breakout with their seventh feature project.
As writers of the post-apocalyptic horror film A Quiet Place (2018), they earned a reputation for combining thrills with emotional depth, a formula they tried on a big-budget, digital effects-laden science-fiction monster movie they wrote and directed, 65 (2023), with poorer critical and commercial results.
Heretic marks a return to their lower-budget roots. Most of it takes place in one house, albeit in different rooms. And, like A Quiet Place, it is a masterful blend of thriller and mystery elements with horror.
(From left) Chloe East, Sophie Thatcher and Hugh Grant in Heretic.
PHOTO: MM2 ENTERTAINMENT
The suspenseful drive of the film comes from the vagueness surrounding creepy Mr Reed’s ultimate motive for trapping them in his home.
He is the predator in this cat-and-mouse game, but there is a uniquely gentle quality to his sadistic goading. Mr Reed behaves more like a disappointed schoolteacher than a prison interrogator. He is an educator saddened at being given two low-quality students.
The contrast between his easy-going demeanour and increasingly menacing behaviour gives the scenes an arresting, off-kilter quality.
Much of the tension derives from what the audience knows about Grant, the actor. Over a long career, he has played a succession of charming but flawed men. Heretic asks viewers to imagine William Thacker from the romcom Notting Hill (1999) as a homicidal maniac. Call it a marketing gimmick if you want, but this is an experiment in contrarian casting that works.
Hot take: A chilling chamber piece in which Hugh Grant weaponises his trademark charm as a Reddit-style provocateur holding two Mormon missionaries hostage.
