Heretic (2024) Movie Review: Hugh Grant Blesses a Passable Thriller of Circular Theological Debates

The entire team behind the original “A Quiet Place” has more or less cashed in on the goodwill from that first film to the fullest possible extent—including the I.P. itself, instantly proving that it can’t be sustained for more than a single outing. Not least of these savvy artists is its pair of screenwriters, Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who’ve leveraged the success of their neat little premise (as long as you don’t think about it for more than 15 seconds) into a support line for their flailing joint career as writer-directors. Now, just over a year after somehow making “Adam Driver Fights Dinosaurs” boring (so I’ve been told, anyway; who actually sat down and watched “65”?), Beck and Woods return with a new selling point unlikely to fail them quite as surprisingly as their previous one had.

We all love a good theological debate—mostly because they can make you feel smart and superior to those around you without actually having to concretely prove anything—and in the smug stubbornness required to sustain most of these discussions, Beck and Woods have found their ideal player. Hugh Grant—a man of such weathered distinction and dry wit that he probably signed on for a project entitled “A Very English Scandal” without ever reading the script—is just about the perfect vessel one could envision for a contained game of religious one-upmanship that composes the entirety of “Heretic.” So good is Grant, in fact, that like any charismatic religious (cult) figure, he almost distracts you from realizing that, like any theological discussion, this one just goes in circles without much in the way of substantive revelations.

Delightfully caustic and disarmingly welcoming as Grant’s Mr. Reed is, it only makes sense that the man living in a secluded hillside house would accept the invitation to have two Mormon missionaries, Sisters Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Paxton (Chloe East), come into his cozy abode and preach the good news. Mr. Reed is more than open to discussing the greater implications of religion and the quest for meaning that these young ladies hope to answer for him in their own unsure way. But the longer their discussion goes on—and the longer the wife who was promised to be in the kitchen baking a pie doesn’t appear—the longer Barnes and Paxton begin to question their host.

Sure enough, Mr. Reed’s home has been rigged into some sort of inescapable, almost labyrinthine cage for his two existentially unassured guests; in his typical Hugh Grant inflection—at once reassuring and subtly backhanded—Reed informs them that they can leave anytime they want, although the front door is bolted shut on a timer and the only way out is through the halls of his mysterious spiritual death trap. To make it out, however, Barnes and Paxton will be forced to reason their way through Reed’s intellectual rigor.

Not so much a series of “Saw” traps as it is one prolonged debate about the value of devotion and the search for the “one true religion,” “Heretic” maintains a solid tension through most of its first two acts, not only thanks to Grant’s gracious presence but also how Beck and Woods utilize him. Given their experience in crafting “A Quiet Place,” it only makes sense that the pair understands the value of pacing and silence as a means of building suspense.

“Heretic” makes full use of this skillset, particularly in how the script seems almost perfectly tailored to Grant’s specific speech pattern; his cadence and rhythm of authoritative speech, constantly peppered with eerie silences and the dripping water of a leaky roof, sells the notion that this is a man in complete control of the lives of those in front of him, and would be even if he didn’t have the keys to the exit.

Thatcher and East—operating on two different registers of devotion that the film thankfully never spells out beyond a purposely cheesy opening conversation about the marketing illusion of Magnum condoms—are also quite capable as the mice trapped in Reed’s nefarious experiment. But Grant is sorely missed whenever he’s not onscreen, even with the godlike work going on directly behind the camera courtesy of Chung Chung-hoon.

The usual cinematographer for Park Chan-wook, Chung makes incomparable use of the claustrophobia of the film’s setting, exploiting as much of the cramped space and lantern lighting as he can through his widened lens and critical understanding of spatial awareness. While Beck and Woods are certainly no Park—primarily in the storytelling department—Chung at least does a qualified enough job of almost fooling you into thinking that Mia Wasikowska and Matthew Goode are in the room next door going through their own crisis of temptation.

For a film necessarily relying on the tightness of its setting and intimacy of scale—the next-billed name in the cast after this main trio is Topher Grace as the girls’ church elder, in nothing more than a glorified cameo—“Heretic” does find itself unable to sustain its momentum for a near-two-hour runtime that would have been just right at a taut 90 minutes. The degree to which Reed is willing to test the Mormon sisters’ faith starts out compellingly enough, but by the time things start feeling more improvised (an admittance made within the narrative), you can tell that this was a debate, like all theological discussions, that was never meant to be closed out in any meaningful way. Religious zealots are annoying enough, but rest assured, nonbelievers can say a whole lot of nothing just as obnoxiously; you need only ask Bill Maher.

In a sense, the notion of ending a film like “Heretic” so underwhelmingly does almost work as a perfect commentary on the unfulfilling realities of the search for religious enlightenment—a reality that Mr. Reed himself would have been more than happy to orchestrate. When it’s all said and done, though, Scott Beck and Bryan Woods are operating within a messy generic framework that makes this seeming realization more a result of accidental victory than the master strategy of meticulous preparation. Talk someone’s ear off long enough, and you might land on something amounting to an idea, whether you intended to or not.