What Heretic Reveals About Faith, Religion, and the zeitgeist of the 21st century
The 2024 thriller Heretic stood out from the moment I saw the trailer in theaters.
The idea of a horror film delving into the philosophical debates around religion, faith, and atheism felt unprecedented for those two and a half minutes. In reality, of course, this particular subgenre is in fact rife with precedent.
But let me start by saying this: Heretic was very different from what I expected based on the trailer.
Hugh Grant plays Mr. Reed, an aging bachelor with a dry sense of humor who is perpetually toeing the line between benign lonely uncle and insidious predator. The other two leading characters, Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East), are members of the church of Latter Day Saints. They encounter Mr. Reed while out visiting potential converts to the Mormon religion. Mr. Reed invites them into his home on the pretense of hearing them out as they proselytize their faith.
The vibes are off, but the girls, committed to carrying out their mission of converting Mr. Reed, overlook the red flags. They soon realize they are trapped in the house. Mr. Reed begins to question them more aggressively about their religion. As his erratic behavior intensifies, Sister Paxton and Sister Barnes try to find an escape, but with each failed attempt, they are greeted by one horror after another—all part of Mr. Reed’s twisted maze of an existentialist fever dream.
One way in which the film falls flat is its failure to fully identify with a single genre—not that there’s anything wrong with that, per se. But it doesn’t work in this instance, and for a couple of reasons.
Heretic is billed as a psychological horror, but suspenseful scenes are few and far between. When the rare jump scare finds its footing, the punchline doesn’t hold up. So fine, it’s a horror that’s not scary. I could overlook that if other elements—dare I say, a good story?—gave the film some legs to stand on. Something to push it beyond a dramatization of a philosophical debate between Richard Dawkins and a seminary undergrad.
This brings me to my main gripe with the film, which is that its central thesis is doing all the heavy lifting. Rather than chip away at the characters and the plot to reveal a deeper meaning, writers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods appear to have taken the opposite approach, starting with a thematic concept and building the plot around it.
It’s an instance of writing a story around a predetermined conclusion, rather than the other way around. I think the best stories reveal their own conclusions as they unfold. To give credit where credit is due, I suspect I came around to that idea based on narrative advice offered in Stephen King’s On Writing, and I think we can all agree that he knows a thing or two about good storytelling. The argument about religion is an opportunity to make a film, rather than a film presenting the opportunity to talk about religion
To its credit, the film does lay out some powerful arguments against organized religion in an interesting way. For example, Mr. Reed presents the girls with two board games: Monopoly and The Landlord’s Game. He compares the rebranding of The Landlord’s Game as Monopoly to the major religions of the world, positing that all these belief systems are different names for the same thing.
The broader concept underlying the film boils down to the simple question of faith in God, but we also encounter thematic elements of sin, consciousness, and the afterlife. One of my favorite aspects is the symbolism of the house, which is constructed like an endless maze. On the wall is a poster of Dante’s Inferno, emblematic of the persistent and pernicious nature of sin, by whichever definition one may attribute to the concept.
It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that this film comes on the tailwinds of a widespread reckoning against certain sects of organized religion. I would make the argument that Heretic is, at least in part, an output of the ongoing liberation movement of young people in general, but specifically young women, from the repressive doctrine preached in Christian churches across the country. A recent survey found that of the Gen Z participants who had left the church, 54% were women. Watching stand-up comedians like Taylor Tomlinson or the reality-tv-family-turned dumpster-fire, the Duggars, it’s not hard to understand why.
And then there are the chronically online among us who have spent one too many late nights lurking on Reddit threads and YouTube comment sections, trying to reconcile all that we learned about the world growing up with the modern landscape we’ve since woken up to. The Landlord’s Game as a model of capitalism is one example, and there’s also the mention of the Hardee’s vs. Carl’s Junior controversy (TL;DR: it’s basically the same restaurant).
Ultimately, Heretic didn’t leave me particularly inspired, entertained, or feeling much of anything at all. It wasn’t earth-shattering by any definition. Still, to see on screen an iteration of the religious dogma that curated nearly every square inch of my own adolescence, a visual representation of the true conviction that believers in a certain god or religion often experience, coupled with the doubt that accompanies any genuine faith—that was original for me.
