Hugh Grant has been working hard over the last few years to shake off the remains of his ‘golly gosh’ floppy-haired young romantic lead persona. Turns as the pantomime villain in the underrated Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Amongst Thieves, a family-friendly baddie in Paddington 2 and… er… an Oompa Loompa in Wonka have gone a long way towards rehabilitating or transforming his professional reputation. Heretic should put the final nails in the coffin of an image that has frustrated him for decades as he delivers quite possibly the performance of his career to date.
Two young female Mormon missionaries – Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East), their youthful naivety and innocence nicely established in the film’s opening scene – are spreading the word in their local community. They call upon the rather forbidding home of Mr Reed (Grant), an affable, reclusive Englishman who invites them into his home, assuring them that his wife is inside baking a pie. Pie is not forthcoming – neither is Mr Reed’s wife – but he does engage them in a long, rather well-considered theological discussion, and before long, not unnaturally, the girls become more than a little uneasy. Having delivered his own arguments with conviction and erudition, he presents the girls with two options by which they can leave his achingly sepia-toned home, two doors upon which he chalks ‘belief’ and ‘disbelief’. The girls must make a final decision about where their loyalties and their beliefs lie… and here their nightmare really begins.
Heretic is an intelligent, thought-provoking and refreshingly unshowy horror film. Largely unconcerned with cheap jump scares, the film hinges largely on Grant’s mesmerisingly convincing performance as a man who has devoted a considerable portion of life to his obsession with religion and its place in the modern world and who will, apparently, stop at nothing to reinforce his own particular viewpoint. Unfortunately, the film can’t resist toppling into more traditional modern horror conventions in its third act, where it loses some of its articulate bite, and its ambiguous ending tends to frustrate. But ultimately, Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’ film is gripping, mainly thanks to Hugh Grant’s magnificently steely and edgy performance.
HERETIC is in UK cinemas now.
