Saw Heretic this morning with my mom. Nothing wrong with a bit of light horror over brunch. If you haven’t seen the trailer, here it is:
I actually want to get into my deeper thoughts about this movie, particularly watching it as an atheist and humanist, but a few generalities first:
Hugh Grant absolutely crushes it. As an actor who is generally boxed into doofy nice guy characters, him getting a turn at horror was either going to be really good or really bad, and he fucking runs the table. But unlike, say, Robin Williams in One Hour Photo, he doesn’t show his acting chops by playing opposite his normal type in a really effective way. Instead he does his usual routine of jocular, avuncular, occasionally pulls very classic Hugh Grant faces, but he’s added in an undercurrent of absolute sociopathy and meneace that really works with the film’s concept. Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East, who play the two hapless Mormon missionaries, are also really good.
It’s not a movie that has a feast of jump scares or gore. Its true currency is dread and tension, which it tries to crank up with long scenes of Hugh Grant doing an impression of everyone’s favorite college philosophy professor lecturing on religion punctuated by a sometimes literally descent into wrongness hidden under a suburban facade. I am a massive weenie, and I watched this with no problems; I feel like at times the Hugh Grant as Socratic lecturer went on a bit longer than necessary before the next turn of the narrative crank, but your mileage may vary on that. I think it could have gone from the 110-minute run time down to 90 without really losing anything, but we seem to be in the era of every movie that could be comfortably an hour and a half reaching for two hours anyway. (Red One, which I saw yesterday and also enjoyed for very different reasons, is 123 minutes and really didn’t need to be that long either.)
So basically, if you’re interested in watching a dread-focused movie and don’t mind listening to people talk about religion for stretches, it’s worth your time. The performances alone are worth it; everyone’s giving their all.
But now, I’m going to get into spoiler territory. I want to talk about what I feel is the true point of Heretic‘s horror.
Do not read further if you don’t want to be spoiled! I mean it!
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On the way home from the movie, my mom complained a bit that it was annoying how Hugh Grant, who does this really excellent job of laying out a lot of atheist arguments about religion throughout the film, is a murderous psychopath. To which I jokingly replied that after so many films with religious murderous psychopaths, it’s refreshing that we’ve got one of our own.
But the more I think of it, the more I conclude that reading Heretic as a film about faith versus lack thereof, while valid, misses what I took to be the deeper message at its end. And I will say, considering all the advertising for the movie really focuses on the questioning of faith, I don’t blame anyone for looking at it that way. If nothing else, I’m sure focusing on faith is a good way to drive some butts into the seats.
But this is the thing: Hugh Grant’s character, Mr. Reed, isn’t really non-religious. He may well be an atheist, depending on how you want to cut that definition, but Sister Paxton reads his own conclusion to him at the end, after he’s led her to it: that the only true religion is control. She reaches this conclusion, for those of you who have chosen to be spoiled, after descending into Mr. Reed’s sub-sub-basement and finding at the end of his religiously-decorated labyrinth, a cold and unadorned room where he keeps psychologically broken women in cages.
Mr. Reed is a very fervent believer in that religion, and I’d go so far as to argue that means he’s not an atheist, because he views himself as thus a god, one he’s recruited his own worshipers for by force. Heretic isn’t ultimately about a mad atheist breaking down the faithful by force; it’s about a practitioner of some of the oldest belief systems–patriarchy and misogyny–trying out his own arcane methods of controlling women. What cloaks the misogyny is that he doesn’t lower himself to the coarse insults that you get out of a lot of misogynistic villains; he even at one point forces a weeping Sister Paxton to say that what she believes to be a contraceptive implant from Sister Barnes’s arm was a secret she didn’t know about because their church would have tried to shame Sister Barnes for it. On one hand he strongly makes the point that the church is and always has been interested in controlling the two women he’s captured… even as he keeps his own collection of women in cages. And just in case there was any doubt to the gendered nature of his attack on “faith,” one of the male missionaries from the church stops by to ask after Barnes and Paxton, and Mr. Reed sends him on his way with disinterested good cheer. Mr. Reed is only interested in breaking the control of one religion so he can replace it with his own–over women.
The religious arguments of Heretic were never about intellectual discourse or making someone genuinely question a belief for their own development. They’re all very much about browbeating women into getting Mr. Reed closer to what he wants. In that way, Mr. Reed is the horror movie version of a type of guy I have encountered in real life, and in atheist/skeptic spaces. (See: The Bill Maher Guy) So in that sense, it actually worked quite well for me that Mr. Reed spent all of his time making really well-spoken atheist arguments that were designed to manipulate rather than enlightened. It’s a thing that definitely happens.
In that sense, I also found the ending of the film deeply satisfying; when Mr. Reed tells Paxton to pray, and she informs him that prayer doesn’t work, and she knows it doesn’t work… but then proceeds to pray anyway because “I think it’s nice that we try to think about other people sometimes.” Her assertion there is not an act of faith versus nonbelief; she doesn’t go into her prayer claiming that god will save or or any such thing. Mr. Reed thinks only of himself and what he wants, and considers everything to be in service of that. Paxton decides that if she’s going to die, she will do so on her own terms, because thinking of others is perhaps the ultimate repudiation of his selfishness and thirst for power, his worship of both himself and control.
Is Barnes dragging herself up for one last strike to take Mr. Reed down a miracle? She dies for good, afterward. Is Paxton seeing a butterfly landing on her finger, as she said she’d like to do if she could come back after death, a miracle or a hallucination? I don’t think either really matters, in the ambiguity of the ending. Paxton has escaped Mr. Reed’s version of hell through luck and the selflessness of Barnes. If she sees that butterfly, it’s an affirmation of another woman reaching out to her and helping her again. The entire downfall of Mr. Reed was catalyzed by one of his captive women giving lie to his faith in his own control and giving Paxton the slight advantage she needed to knock him off balance. And there’s no doubt in my mind that if Paxton manages to stagger her way to a place with cell phone signal, the first thing she’ll do is send help back for Mr. Reed’s other prisoners. The question the movie asks is not about faith in the existence of god, but when all is broken down, about faith in our fellow humans.