[COLUMN] In Heretic, Nothing is Scarier Than a Conversation | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains some hefty spoilers for the plot of Heretic, which is well worth seeing as blind as possible. So feel free to bookmark and come back after you’ve seen it.

From its opening moments, Heretic is preoccupied with talking.

The film’s credits play out over a gentle conversation between two Mormon missionaries, Sister Paxton (Chloe East) and Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher). There is no score, just the ambient sound of the world around them. The credits are placed at the top left and bottom right corners of the screen, rather than occupying the center of the frame. It’s an interesting way to open a film, particularly a horror film. It’s not particularly flashy or overwhelming. It is just two characters talking.

Heretic is written and directed by veteran filmmaking duo Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who are perhaps best known as the writers of A Quiet Place, along with John Krasinski. As such, there is something deliberate about the emphasis on dialogue in Heretic, as if the pair are reacting against their breakout hit by embracing a formal element that was largely precluded by the premise of that earlier film. In A Quiet Place, nobody could talk. In Heretic, the characters do little but talk.

“The experiment with this film, it was almost the opposite of what we were attempting to do with A Quiet Place,” Woods admits. “A Quiet Place was like a modern day silent film, so it was all about pure cinema. This was, can we replace jump scares and monsters hiding in shadows with dialogue and philosophical ideas?” Of course, Heretic contains a couple of jump scares, but most of the movie is an extended conversation and debate, albeit one with serious stakes.

Paxton and Barnes are ambassadors for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, trying to find potential converts. On their route, they are dispatched to the house of the mysterious Mister Reed (Hugh Grant), who has reached out to the Church expressing his interest in their belief system. Inviting the two young missionaries inside with the promise that wife is just in the kitchen baking blueberry pie, Reed engages the pair in a discussion about the nature of faith and belief. It’s very friendly - until it’s not.

While East and Thatcher are impressive, Grant is the film’s casting coup. On the surface, he makes for an unlikely horror movie monster. Grant is a charismatic and affable British actor, still handsome even in his older age. Grant is still best known for his run of 1990s romantic comedies from Four Weddings and a Funeral through to Notting Hill. He was a true sex symbol. Although People refused to name a “Sexiest Man Alive” in 1994, editor Jess Cagle identified Grant as one of the frontrunners.

As Janet Maslin pointed out, the success of Four Weddings and a Funeral dramatically altered the trajectory of Grant’s career, transforming him from “the clever, versatile character actor” into an “international dreamboat.” Heretic understands this facet of Grant’s persona. As they study Reed’s living room, Paxton and Barnes note a framed photograph of Reed and a dog, which is obviously a shot of young Hugh Grant at home with the dog that he shared with former fiancée Liz Hurley.

Still, Grant was never just an insanely handsome romantic leading man. He was more erudite than the other heartthrobs of the era. “I interviewed lots of young leading men, and Hugh had something no one else had – the ability to speak the lines,” recalls Mike Newell, director of Four Weddings and Funeral. “These are characters who talk very highly structured jokes, and I had to have someone who could deliver that kind of incredibly precise dialogue. Hugh was good with his mouth.”

In recent years, while still handsome, Grant has pivoted back into a character actor space. He has felt more comfortable playing rogues and villains, in movies like Pirates! in an Adventure with Scientists or Paddington 2. He has weaponized the audience’s relationship with his charming screen persona to subvert it in television projects like A Very English Scandal or The Undoing. Grant has discovered something uncanny in his handsomeness, wit and sophistication – and is leaning into it.

“I’m in the freak show phase of my career,” Grant explained while promoting Wonka. “I do baddies, psychopaths, weirdos, perverts and now Oompa Loompas.” However, Grant hasn’t discovered some new muscle. “The genius of Hugh Grant’s big horror turn in Heretic is that, really, he’s the same Hugh Grant as before,” observed Clarisse Loughrey in her review. “He still rushes headfirst into his sentences, only to end them with a sheepish smile. He still parcels out morsels of sincerity with a shrug and a chuckle, bashful at any admission of vulnerability. In short, he’s irresistibly charismatic.”

As such, Heretic becomes a horror movie about conversation and rhetoric. The film is ostensibly about religion. It’s possible to see it, like Conclave, as a companion piece to the recent wave of blockbusters about an absent God. Reed claims to have done a PhD in organized religion, and to have through that process discovered “the one true religion.” He hopes to test Barnes and Paxton, to break their faith and to convince them that he has found the ultimate expression of religious faith. It’s a hot topic for a mainstream horror movie, but it also feels like something of a red herring.

Heretic isn’t really about faith in any meaningful or substantial way. Indeed, one of the big recurring themes of the movie is that Reed doesn’t actually believe in any ideology beyond himself. In one key sequence, he invites Paxton and Barnes to exit his house through one of two doors from his library. One door is marked “belief”, the other “disbelief.” Reed gives a fairly ominous speech about the importance of the choice facing the two young women, inviting them to choose wisely.

The grim punchline of this sequence is that both doors ultimately open to a set of stairs that lead down into the same basement chamber. Choice is an illusion. It doesn’t matter whether Paxton or Barnes choose “belief” or “disbelief.” They end up in exactly the same place, and Reed gets to continue his torture of them. Heretic is not about these decisions. It is not about the content of the argument. Reed isn’t interested in the exchange of ideas. The film is, instead, about the argument itself. It is about the horror of discourse.

This is the beauty of Grant’s performance. As played by Grant, Reed is a mercurial figure. He’s incredibly gifted verbally. Reed makes a point to never directly threaten Barnes and Paxton. He repeatedly insists that they are in no danger and that they are free to leave whenever they like. These are lies, but he delivers them convincingly and reassuringly. He never raises his voice. He always has an answer, even if that answer doesn’t make any sense. He never gets physical. He frames himself as reasonable and rational.

As Reed lures Barnes and Paxton deeper into the house, Heretic takes on the shape of a particular type of modern horror, what might be termed “the social horror.” Reed is polite and charismatic. Both Barnes and Paxton pick up on small social cues that unnerve them, but nothing substantial enough to justify making a scene. They are kept in place by manners and civility, even as the stakes slowly escalate. It recalls Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation or Christian Tafdrup's Speak No Evil.

Speak No Evil is an overt influence. At the climax, Paxton discovers a room at the very bottom of the house, where Reed keeps his “converts” in cages. Looking at the shivering women, the young Mormon demands, “Why are you doing this?” Reed replies, “The real question is: why are they letting me?” It evokes the ending of Speak No Evil. “Why are you doing this to us?” Bjørn (Morten Burian) asked Patrick (Fedja van Huêt). Patrick answered, “Because you let us.” Barnes and Paxton’s politeness can be weaponized against them.

The true horror of Heretic is the sense in which Reed is able to make almost anything seem rational and plausible, so long as he avoids escalating to direct confrontation. He is unflinchingly polite. When he broaches the controversial topic of bigamy in Mormonism, he makes sure to ask if it’s okay to do so, so Paxton and Barnes would be rude to refuse. When Barnes and Paxton come inside, he makes sure to explain there’s metal in the walls and ceiling, so he can later (falsely) claim he warned them their phones wouldn’t work.

There is a commonly held belief in liberal democracies that free speech is an absolute right, and that public discussion serves as a sort of “marketplace of ideas”, in which good ideas inevitably vanquish bad ideas. It’s a very utopian idea, the belief that two sides of an issue can come to an amicable understanding – if not an agreement – through debate and reason. However, the truth is that such a system only works if both parties can be trusted to engage in good faith.

While Reed positions himself as a man looking to have a conversation and presents himself as the voice of reason and rationality, he is not acting in good faith. He employs various rhetorical tricks in an effort to “steamroll” Paxton and Barnes. He barely lets them get a word in. He draws attention to his education repeatedly, bluntly correcting Paxton when she attributes “with great power comes great responsibility” to Spider-Man rather than to Voltaire. He answers either-or questions with a “yes” to avoid having to clarify his position, making it harder to engage with him.

There are several points where he claims to mishear the two young women (“a malicious affliction,” he admits), suggesting he’s not actually listening. He bombards them with factoids about the Hollies or the history of Monopoly. He has a PowerPoint presentation and a script. He talk-sings Radiohead and indulges in a bizarre impersonation of Jar-Jar Binks (Ahmed Best). He also lies, but surrounds those lies with half-truths and breezes past them when called out on them. He keeps his guests off-balance using props. It’s very entertaining – Heretic is effectively a two-hour Hugh Grant monologue – but it’s also deliberately vacuous.

The most shallow reading of Heretic would suggest that Reed is effectively an extremely polished social media poster, the kind of person for whom “just asking questions” hides a more sinister motivation. In reality, the horror of Heretic lies in the idea that even the most horrific and unsettling ideas can be normalized if they are framed calmly and rationally, and that a polished performance delivered with enough style can convince even seemingly rational people of the most insane things.

Reed doesn’t seem to believe any of the things that he says, but that doesn’t matter. His plan is simply to overwhelm Paxton and Barnes. At one stage, he claims to have discovered the key to resurrection and offers to demonstrate. Barnes, the more worldly of the missionaries, sees through the rhetorical trick, “I was wondering how you were going to make killing us seem like our idea.” Reed believes that people can be convinced to act fundamentally against their own best interests. Barnes and Paxton’s only chance of survival is to ignore what Reed is actually saying and to understand what he is doing - to take him “seriously, not literally.”

This is a deeply unsettling notion, because it undermines one of the core beliefs of modern liberal democracy, the belief that the best ideas will always win out. Instead, Heretic feels like a response to the collapse of the public sphere in recent years, and the slipping of public discourse into some nightmarish nihilism. This was a trend that was obvious to many of those on the early internet, but it has entered the mainstream over the past decade or so.

Heretic suggests that a sufficiently charismatic and sociopathic person armed with the right words and arguments can be as deadly as any maniac with a butcher's knife.