Heretic – Dir: Scott Beck & Bryan Woods (13th Floor Film Review)

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Heretic is a beautifully unsettling psychological horror film by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, one that relies on flawless performances, excruciating pacing, and razor-sharp writing to create an atmosphere of dread that crawls beneath your skin and permeates relentlessly throughout the 111-minute runtime.

Starring: Hugh Grant, Sophie Thatcher, Chloe East, Topher Grace

HereticWhat an unholy year we’ve had for deeply unsettling and exquisitely presented horror. We’ve had Nic Cage terrifying us in Longlegs, the outstanding unease and graphic horror of Smile 2, the exquisite ASMR body-horror nightmare of The Substance, and now, creeping in right at the end to charmingly tear apart your universal perceptions and beliefs, we have Heretic.

The film focuses on Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East), two Mormon missionaries who knock on the door of Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant), an initially bashful and charming gentleman who rapidly, and relentlessly, descends into extreme, unimaginable manipulation and psychological domination.

From its slow-burn opening to its brutal finale, Heretic grips you immediately with its claustrophobic tension, as the missionaries’ polite but increasingly uneasy interaction with Reed spirals into something far more insidious. Part of what makes Heretic so exceptional is the blending of its themes with the experience, with each reveal and subsequent layer of the film instilling every bit of fear and dread of the unknown in the audience as it does its characters.

Grant’s performance as Reed is incredible, perfectly leveraging his well-known near-caricature of himself as the charming, bumbling, apologetic gentleman. It’s a brilliant turn to watch Grant weaponise his charisma here, delivering a performance so nuanced and restrained that it lulls you into a false sense of safety even as his words slice and carve beneath your skin.

Although it seems reductionary to draw on the most obvious allegories in this film – the set design is Hereditary on steroids – it is, without question, one of my favourite representations of ‘The Devil’ I have witnessed on screen in recent memory; soothing, inviting, controlling and absolutely terrifying.

Thatcher as the confident Sister Barnes and East as the timid Sister Paxton form the emotional heart of the story, and complement each other authentically and beautifully in their performances. Their chemistry immediately feels genuine, drawing the audience deeply into their plight through every agonising frame of the film. East’s portrayal of Paxton in particular, who begins meek and uncertain but grows into a figure of resilience and clarity while maintaining an unbreakable grace, is an absolute masterclass in character transformation.

All of this is accentuated by the incredible cinematography by Chung Chung-hoon, capturing the suffocating isolation of Reed’s home, shadowy hallways evoking the feeling of Dante’s Inferno and creating a soulless purgatory of Reed’s design. Each frame feels crafted with meticulous consideration, from the flickering candlelight to a close-up of a bead of sweat; every moment, every feeling, every breath is drawn and stretched to its absolute limit.

It also seemingly references two of my favourite horror films, No One Lives and The VVitch but, when examining a film that frames itself on the concept of ‘we see what we want to see’ it becomes frustratingly difficult to try and analyse – the kind of frustration that makes simply being taken along for the ride so much more enjoyable.

Heretic is a film that demands your attention and dares you to look deeper into the darkest, cruellest corners of human belief; beautifully acted, brilliantly paced, and has an outstanding, engaging narrative that grips you with a lingering sense of unease. It’s a film where I desperately want to say more, to deconstruct every masterful little moment of dialogue or visceral sound design, but as mentioned, there’s a magic in the mystery of experiencing this film through an untainted lens.

Heretic blurs the lines between faith and delusion, challenges the audience to question everything they’ve seen, and presents itself as both haunting in its ambiguity and cathartic in its message; hope is the burden of finding meaning in a meaningless world, and in a meaningless world, hope is all we have to keep us human.

Oxford Lamoureaux

Heretic opens in cinemas November 28th. Click here for tickets and showtimes.

 

 

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