Captive Audience

Film: Heretic
Format: Streaming video from HBO Max on Fire!

Hugh Grant is in his villain era, and I am here for it. While he’s played a villain or two in the past (Bridget Jones comes to mind), lately he’s been doing more and more bad guy roles in films both comical and serious. He’s great in Paddington 2 and equally fun in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. It has to be fun to reinvent yourself in this way, to go from the rom-com boyfriend to various incarnations of evil. That’s exactly where we’re headed with Heretic.

Grant, in Heretic, is having a really good time. He’s enjoying the hell out of being someone truly, diabolically evil. We are going to have to deal with the religious implications of this, because Heretic does what many movies that have a religious bent do, and even some without much of a religious angle: it’s going to make sure that the evil being done is being done by someone who will eventually discover is a non-believer, because of course he is.

It's an interesting choice not to make the bad guy a de facto atheist, but to make the main characters a couple of female Mormon missionaries. Our Latter Day Saints, Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East) are heading to the house of a man who has asked for more information about the church. The arrive in a rainstorm and are asked inside—something they can only do if there is a woman in the house. Their host, Mr. Reed (Grant) assures them that his wife is in the next room.

What follows is a discussion on the nature of religion and belief, with Reed making a number of points about the similarities of many religions (the frequency of virgin birth, resurrection, etc.), all the while promising blueberry pie as a reward. It’s soon evident that all of this is a sham. When Paxton and Barnes attempt to leave, they find the front door locked and no way to unlock it, the smell of baking blueberry pie is coming from a candle, and they are alone in the house with a man who is becoming more and more threatening and disturbing with each passing minute.

In the course of the discussion, Reed makes a number of interesting points about exactly how religion seems to work in terms of the stories it tells. He makes a direct comparison between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, stating that Judaism has few followers in large part because they don’t proselytize. He also makes an interesting comparison between those three religions and different versions of Monopoly, ultimately comparing Mormonism to the weird, regional versions of Monopoly.

What he wants is for Paxton and Barnes to understand that he has discovered the one true religion, and he wants them to essentially be his converts, and we are going to go deeper and darker into the world that Reed has created to get there, with Reed subtly manipulating everything that is going on around them, giving them choices, where it seems like whatever they pick is whatever they want.

Heretic is a frustrating movie for me because Mr. Reed, for all of his manipulation and sadistic glee, is right about almost everything he says. It’s always good in a movie where there is a villain who actually makes sense, someone who is, essentially, right about things. Killmonger in Black Panther comes to mind, as does Magneto from the X-Men franchise. Even silly examples, like the principal from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off work for this—he’s more and more right about everything the older I get. And Reed is right, too—and as often happens in a film like this, making him be right and the bad guy means that the right message gets put in the mouth of someone terrible.

It's like in the live-action version of 101 Dalmatians, Cruella De Vil says, “More good women have been lost to marriage than to war, famine, disease and disaster.” She’s fundamentally right, but you don’t want a quote like that coming from your sympathetic character, do you? No, you want that coming from someone terrible, because it gives you an excuse to disagree with what is being said—a way to rationalize it away.

That’s Heretic in a lot of respects. It’s better than it has any right to be, but it would certainly be nice if the guy who has the good arguments wasn’t also the worst person in the movie.

Why to watch Heretic: Hugh Grant is having the most fun of his career.
Why not to watch: Making the bad guy an atheist is too easy and frustrating.