Hugh Grant Is Riveting as a Creep Out to Mansplain Earnest Mormon Missionaries to Death in the Atmospheric Fright Flick Heretic

It's Hugh Grant as you've never seen him before!

Hugh Grant is a handsome, charming, and likable onscreen presence but a prickly, misanthropic, and sometimes abrasive human being. Grant famously does not enjoy acting, something he’s quite good at and that pays very well, or movies, entertainment, the press, or the public. 

Grant doesn’t seem to like much beyond the abundant awards that come with movie stardom, chief among them a fuck ton of money and the opportunity to have sex with lots of beautiful women. 

Grant’s offscreen misanthropy makes him an inspired choice to pay an evil fuck intent on mansplaining a pair of earnest young Mormon women to death in the riveting fright flick Heretic. 

Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East deliver deceptively tricky, complicated performances as Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton, respectively. They’re Mormon missionaries proselytizing on behalf of the Church of Latter-Day Saints to a public that seems apathetic at best and actively contemptuous at worst. 

Thatcher and East are both ex-Mormon, which adds to the verisimilitude of the proceedings.

Reclusive weirdo Mr. Reed (Grant) lures the zealots to his haunted house of a home by pretending to be curious about the tenets of Mormonism and open to joining the faith. 

Intellectual and religious openness is the bait the unassuming-seeming monster uses to trap the freaked-out Mormons in a house that feels less like a conventional home than the sinister lair of a witch in a fairy tale. 

The Church’s rules dictate that the missionaries cannot be alone with a man. Mr. Reed gets around this rule by promising Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton that his shy wife is in the kitchen with a blueberry pie but will be out any minute. 

You’ll never look at a blueberry pie the same way. Hell, you may never eat blueberry pie again after the perversely central role it plays in the proceedings.

From the beginning, something seems irrevocably off about Mr. Reed. It would be more accurate to say that everything feels wrong. 

Even before the front door is locked for the evening for reasons that don’t make sense, the women are on high alert that Mr. Reed is interested in them for reasons that have nothing to do with an ostensible interest in the teachings of Joseph Smith. 

The missionaries' sense of danger increases when they realize that they have no phone signals and consequently cannot contact the outside world. 

Everything about the Sisters’ situation renders them vulnerable. 

Mr. Reed couldn’t be less open to receiving the gospel of Joseph Smith. He’s not interested in hearing what the Sisters have to say. He’s not interested in having a conversation about faith and religion. Instead, he’s interested in talking to the woman. He doesn’t want to chat; he wants to deliver an unending monologue for the sake of his own benefit rather than his audience.

Grant’s heavy appears to be something of a Luddite. He’s extremely offline, yet he also embodies a ubiquitous and regrettable social media fixture: an obnoxious know-it-all who pretends to be interested in having an honest, good-faith exchange of ideas and open to changing their opinions if presented with enough compelling evidence.  

This infuriating practice is known online as sea-lioning. It helps make the World Wide Web an awful place full of traps for earnest souls who make the terrible mistake of assuming the best about bad people. 

Sea-lioning enthusiasts never operate in good faith. They’re fundamentally dishonest about their beliefs and their intentions. They are, in other words, the fucking worst. 

These are the Facebook-dwelling assholes who begin their comments with, “Actually” and can’t wait to share information with women they assume know nothing.  

Heretic captures the claustrophobic horror of being stuck in a gloomy abode with the most obnoxious, insufferable, and persistent asshole on a Facebook post comment thread.

In true Sea-Lion form, Mr. Reed cynically and unpersuasively cosplays as a nice husband with a flexible mind and an open heart when he could not be more brittle or unwavering in his unfortunate convictions. 

Reed is interested in funerals but not weddings.

The harder the young women's tormentor tries to seem nice and genial, the more menacing he seems. Reed knows that nice Mormon girls can’t tell someone ostensibly receptive to being saved to go fuck himself.

Reed has what know-it-alls want most: a captive audience.   Being good Mormons, the young women express their concern over Reed’s troubling behavior as politely and respectfully as possible. 

The missionaries do not seem at all surprised to discover that their overly ingratiating captor fancies himself an expert not just on Mormonism but on all major religions and some minor ones as well. 

The smilingly unpleasant sexagenarian is spoiling for a fight. He can’t wait to unload all of the information he has acquired during his long, tedious years of “research” into why everyone else is wrong and he is right about the one true religion and everything else. 

Writer/directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods favor atmosphere and dread over gore. For the first hour, there is no physical violence, only the looming threat/promise that something very bad will definitely happen. 

Grant’s pathologically chatty sociopath is the rare horror movie villain motivated primarily by smugness and an unearned sense of intellectual superiority. He fancies himself a philosopher when he’s really just a sadist. 

Heretic is talky in the best possible way. Words are Reed’s weapons. They’re his way of talking his opponents into submission. He can’t conceive that anyone might be on his intellectual level, particularly young women ostensibly defined by their slavish devotion to a religion even more troubled and troubling than most. 

Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton turn out to be far more savvy, resilient, and strong than they initially appear. They’re formidable adversaries rather than easy prey. 

Heretic turns towards the ghoulish in the third act once the mask comes off, and Reed reveals his twisted end game and the full extent of his madness and evil. 

We’ve never seen Grant like this before. He’s still a strikingly handsome man in his mid-sixties, but there’s nothing remotely likable or appealing about a character who represents everything that’s wrong with men. 

Heretic feels sadly timely in its depiction of the horrors of smug, narcissistic men who pretend to be interested in the ideas and enthusiasm of young women when they’re really only interested in punishing them for their own twisted reasons.

Four Stars out of Five