Heretic’s Ending Begs for a Bigger Idea

Photo: Kimberley French/A24

Spoilers ahead for the plot and ending of Heretic.

Mr. Reed has doubts. Played by a delicious Hugh Grant, who gives what may well be one of his very best performances, Heretic’s villain is an intellectual extremist bent on illustrating the hypocrisy and ills of faith and religion — at the expense of Sisters Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Paxton (Chloe East), two young Mormon missionaries who show up at his front door one stormy afternoon to sell him on the Church of the Latter-Day Saints. The terrible problem, of course, is that he doesn’t stop at just asking questions.

Heretic is a luxuriously talky film, allocating vast run time to an orating Mr. Reed as he ensnares the missionaries in what initially appears to be theological debate but is really his own cruel conversion effort. His intent is to break the women into submission by challenging their faith, studying the choices they make along the way. The movie’s true set pieces are the professorial villain’s ostentatious monologues using fast food, musical plagiarism, and Monopoly as metaphors to point out how modern religions are just conspicuous iterations of what’s come before. To him, bringing that artifice into focus illuminates how the evolution of belief systems across history have come to obfuscate an ancient truth: that beneath it all, the one true religion is control. Frankly, this is a hard argument to dispute, but the guy is ultimately the movie’s monster, so his ideology has to be sufficiently challenged by the time the credits roll. Alas, this is where the film wobbles. Heretic crackles as a showcase for Mr. Reed’s critiques; it’s far less compelling when the film tries to counter them. One ends up wishing for a stronger rebuttal, some convincing reason to believe.

In the film’s hilariously stabby climax, after Sister Paxton spikes Mr. Reed in the throat and he shanks her in the gut, we get one final philosophical parry when the charming maniac tauntingly tells her to pray as they’re both bleeding out. Paxton, pious to the end, responds by talking about the Great Prayer Experiment, a (very real) series of studies that sought to test whether prayer has any tangible healing impact — and conclusively found there to be not. “But I think it’s beautiful that we all pray for each other even though we all probably know it doesn’t make a difference,” she says. “It’s just nice to think about someone other than yourself. Even if it’s you.” It’s basically an appeal to the power of religious feeling, which roughly fits the swelling climax of the scene. But compared to Mr. Reed’s structured argumentation over the course of Heretic, Paxton’s response feels hand-wavy.

Heretic is most effective in its opening stretch when it runs Mr. Reed’s critique of faith and religion through the specific prism of interpersonal politeness. Things immediately feel amiss the moment the Sisters first meet their charming tormentor. “The walls and ceilings have metal in them, if that’s okay,” he amiably notes as they enter the house, a small detail that should strike one as strange — but perhaps not strange enough to ask too many questions. In fact, the house as a whole looks odd: Nothing feels particularly lived in, the proportions are off, the window far too small. As they begin to talk, the Sisters stay polite even as Mr. Reed probes the limits of their conversation. How do they feel about polygamy, he asks, and how do they square the questions raised over the legitimacy of the Mormon church? They spar, slightly, and it soon becomes apparent that Mr. Reed is engaging less in discourse and more in a game of manipulation. “If revelation by God is filtered through man, and man is flawed and man sins and man lies, then how do we know any of it is true?” he asks. “We know it’s true because of how it makes us feel,” Sister Paxton replies. Exactly, Mr. Reed notes, having guided their conversation to the exact spot he intends.

In many ways, Mr. Reed’s target is less organized religion than faith itself. We see this in how he finally loses patience with the Sisters’ continued insistence that he bring out his wife, whom he had claimed was elsewhere in the house. “Do you still believe my wife is in the next room, despite all the evidence to the contrary?” he asks. “Or have you been politely indulging in a lie?” He points out that clear body of evidence: the scented candle simulating the smell of blueberry pie; the fact that he’s already literally trapped them in the house; the weirdness of the makeshift chapel they stand in. He underscores the point: “Did you go on believing something that you know is not true just to give you comfort of what it might mean if it was all a lie?” For some horror-thriller heads, the moment might recall a similar sentiment expressed in the original Speak No Evil, Christian Tafdrup’s 2022 film about a family who gets tortured, and ultimately killed, by a sociopath who takes advantage of their middle-class politeness. (“Why are you doing this?” “Because you let me.”) A similar interpersonal structure plays out in Heretic, though there are other factors in play beyond the Sisters’ religiosity: The power dynamic here has as much to do with gender and age as it does their faith. In any case, unlike the ill-fated family in the original Speak No Evil (though not in the recent American remake), the Sisters try to put up a fight. “We can’t be a physical threat to him,” Barnes tells Paxton when they’re trapped in the creepy bunker below the chapel. “But we can be an intellectual threat.”

There are strong differences between the Sisters. Paxton was born into the church and comes across as more explicitly pious and less inherently questioning of her worldview. In contrast, Barnes is worldlier. Her mother was a convert, and after losing her father to Lou Gehrig’s disease, they tried out a few different denominations before going back into Mormonism. She has an edge, having lived a more complicated life; she also has a contraceptive implant in her arm, a fact that she’s kept quiet from the church for fear of being shamed. So it is Barnes who leads the Sisters’ opposition to Mr. Reed. In the makeshift chapel, she disputes, among other things, his characterization of Judaism being small in population due to a lack of “religious marketing” by pointing out how that doesn’t account for the Holocaust and broader Jewish persecution. There are holes in his logic, too. Her counterargument, essentially, is that his atheism, too, boils down to a kind of feeling.

Given Sister Barne’s general positioning as a synthesis between faith and questioning, you’d think she’d be the Final Girl of the film. So it’s a genuine shock when Mr. Reed slashes her throat with a box cutter. The moment brings the man’s monstrosity into full view, and clarifies the character as an embodiment of the authoritarian aspects of the institutions he critiques. He channels the welcoming charisma that draws many to organized religion; he preys on the faithful and weeds out the skeptical. Having determined that the transgressing Sister Barnes is less likely to be enslaved, he shifts focus to Paxton, the person more likely to buy what he’s selling. The magic trick he inflicts on the women in the bunker — simulating the death and resurrection of a “prophet” — recalls performances of pseudo-miracles in some corners of Christianity. There’s an undercurrent of misogyny in Mr. Reed’s machinations; later, when Sister Paxton finds the other caged victims, it’s notable that they’re all women. Viewed from an angle, you can see Mr. Reed as some kind of twisted archbishop; the women, his nuns. It is purely to Grant’s credit that Mr. Reed thoroughly works as a character, never quite collapsing into a cartoon villain even as the ludicrousness of what’s happening onscreen continues to amp up. In a just world, he should be in the Oscars race for this.

Mr. Reed is a monster, but at the end of the day, it’s hard not to feel that the broad direction of his critiques still stand, and Heretic never quite deals with this uncomfortable tension. Sure, Sister Paxton appeals to the comfort and beauty that faith provides in the face of horror as enough justification for religion’s existence … but is it? And how does that square with the violence of organized religion? After Paxton’s monologue on the Great Prayer Experiment, a fascinating moment transpires: Mr. Reed crawls toward and onto her, and for a beat, he betrays what looks like sadness. He wheezes and whimpers; he seems to cry. Then he raises a box cutter to Paxton’s throat to finish the job … before he’s thwacked on the side of the head with a nailed wooden plank, courtesy of Sister Barnes in her dying breath. It’s a satisfying moment that resolves the movie’s physical conflict. But Heretic’s philosophical tension is left dangling.

For a moment, the film seems interested in the ambiguity of that tension. When Sister Paxton finally breaks out of the house into the reemerging sunlight, she sees a butterfly float onto her hand — a callback to the sentiment that she shared earlier about hoping that, when she dies, she’ll come back as a butterfly so she can watch her loved ones. But there’s a quick cut, after which the butterfly, presumably representing the departed Sister Barnes, is gone. Is Sister Paxton feeling a hollowness in the poetry of her faith here? Or is it a further illustration of her commitment to seeing that beauty? The film cuts out before another beat that would establish Paxton’s evolution one way or another. Given Heretic’s clear joy in kicking around ideas, this is frustrating. One can’t help but wish for all this philosophizing to drive toward a more specific thesis. Perhaps that can be found in a moment that’s less about feeling and more about action. Mr. Reed’s demise by nailed-bat reflects another ancient truth: The side that wins in a battle of religion does so not through philosophy but with violence.