Movie Review: Heretic

Mark Honeychurch - 3 February 2025

I’m a middle-aged guy who likes to spend time talking with Mormon missionaries, and by now I probably get visited about once every month or two by any new missionaries who turn up in the Porirua area. I had two missionaries visit me at the beginning of the new year, and another two just last week. I enjoy talking with them - both hearing their perspectives on their faith and the Mormon church, and trying to give them food for thought when it comes to some of the worse parts of their church organisation.

So, when I read the synopsis of the recently released movie Heretic - a middle-aged man (Hugh Grant) invites a pair of Mormon missionaries in and then interrogates them about their faith - I was intrigued. The fact that it was billed as a horror movie put me off a little, as I’m not normally a fan of horror (with some exceptions, such as Alien, Midsommar and Mother!), but I figured it would still be worth a watch.

The movie started well, with Hugh Grant’s character (Mr Reed) asking theological questions of the two young Mormon sisters (Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East), while subtly psychologically scaring them. Once in the house being interrogated about their faith, the pair are unable to leave - first they are given spurious reasons as to why they should stay, followed by the explanation that they will just be confined for a few hours due to an antiquated door locking mechanism, and then there’s the the slow dawning realisation that they are trapped in the house like lab rats.

The questioning was interesting, although in places it became a little shallow. Mr Reed does a good job of using Monopoly as an analogy for the Abrahamic religions, a demonstration that comes across as a little unhinged in an enjoyably frightening way - as should be the case for a horror movie. However, the idea Mr Reed uses of showing religions to be derivative because they have clear antecedents felt a little more iffy. I know that past documentaries like The God Who Wasn’t There have stretched the truth somewhat to draw parallels between Christianity and older religious beliefs, so I was a little skeptical of the claims being made. I suspect the links between religious beliefs were, at the very least, somewhat over-simplified.

The second half of the movie, however, involves Mr Reed introducing the pair to his reasoning about which religious beliefs might be true through a very contrived, unbelievable scheme. I won’t ruin the movie for those who want to watch it, but suffice it to say that I would much rather have seen the second half of the movie just continue the pace of the first half, slowly building the tension of the sisters trying to talk their way out of their predicament, with Mr Reed interrogating them about their beliefs - what they truly believe, why they believe it, how confident they are about those beliefs. If, after almost two hours of psychologically playing with the Mormons, Mr Reed just let them go, showing that they weren’t in danger after all, I think the movie would have ended a lot stronger. I think it could still have been labelled a horror movie with my imagined ending, I just think there was wasted potential to make it much more nuanced as a piece of believable psychological horror cinema. As it was, the second half of the movie felt like it was asking me to suspend my disbelief a lot more than I was comfortable with.

I’m not sure if I’d recommend this movie to others. Maybe I would with a proviso that people may just want to pretend the second half doesn’t exist, much like the idea of pretending there aren’t any sequels to The Matrix.