Editor’s Note: Vanyaland film editor Nick Johnston is in Canada all week covering the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. And as usual, we wish we were up there with him! Check out our continuing TIFF 2024 coverage, read our official preview, and revisit our complete archives of prior editions.
Blasphemy just ain’t what it used to be, at least in the West. If you’re a horror filmmaker pitching your latest take on religious debate, it’s probably for the best if you make movies about lapsed believers coming to realize that they’re trapped in a reality that they grew to believe was nothing more than fiction, much like Friedkin did with The Exorcist, or you make a movie about religion without fully patronizing it, which requires you to set it in the past (The Witch, for example, which was reinterpreted as a feminist fable instead of a core-shaking tragedy). Belief ain’t what it used to be either. More Americans than ever aren’t identifying with any of the core religions, and the “Moral Majority” sold their shit out to elect a president two elections ago. Aside from one key religious minority, all of the Western religions don’t particularly care anymore if Piss Christ is hanging somewhere unless a Rumble streamer makes a big deal out of it, and even then, that one insular group I mentioned – the Mormons — is more concerned with evangelism than picketing. Like Dicks: The Musical at last year’s TIFF, there’s another A24 film kicking against pricks that would have slayed had it come out in 2007: Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’ Heretic, which may be the first movie to be directly inspired by Reddit atheism discourse, though there aren’t any fedoras in sight. And yes, I know the proper term is “trilby,” but the platonic ideal of the neckbeard’s calling them that.
Beck and Woods came to prominence with A Quiet Place, which made them an in-demand pair of screenwriters who, as most massively successful writers do, decided to direct. Their first feature, 65, was astonishingly dumb ancient aliens shit, but it was absurdly fun, centered around a solid Adam Driver performance. Some said he was slumming for a paycheck, but I thought he was having a good time: what matters is that the same can be said about Hugh Grant in Heretic, who is relishing his post-idol ability to be, in the words of Dennis Rodman, Bad as He Wanna Be. If he shows up in a Guy Ritchie or Paddington Bear movie, you know you’ll have a good time, and it’s always a treat when you see his name in the credits unless you care about what he thinks of the Oompa-Loompa. He genuinely does not give a fuck about the same nonsense that you or I do, as he’s just focused on making sure his performance is an exceptional part of any given film’s landscape, happy to be there and to share his spotlight. His role here is that of the “creepy” next-door neighbor type, who is visited by two Mormon missionaries, Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East), to spread the word and love of their lord and savior, Jesus Christ. Yes, they do make house calls, and yes, they even do missions in Boulder. What they aren’t expecting is that his house has a whole lot of interesting features: metal in the walls, a time-locked deadbolt, and even a faux church in the back. Nor are they expecting what this man will tell them about the nature of the One True God, which might not be what they expect.
Thatcher and East are also well-cast as our co-protagonists. The former is a darkened figure, oddly cut from the Mormon-convert cloth, who nurses doubts about her religion even as she spreads its word. The latter is, well, pretty much your stereotypical Mormon, a delightful and bubbly human who gets way too much bullshit from people on the street about her faith. This goes a long way towards making Heretic’s first half work – it’s mostly just a lengthy conversation between this genial-seeming yet off-putting old man and these two young women, who are initially trying to engage with him earnestly. What he’s saying to them has a bit of obviousness to it, as he’s trying to break their faith through your stereotypical means (“Did you know Jesus wasn’t the only religious figure to come back from the dead or be born near the winter solstice?” and so on), but in Grant’s hands, it’s astonishingly compelling stuff, straddling the boundaries of comedy and terror in equal measure, with a ferocity that makes his bullshit seem intelligent, even if it’s merely clever. Had it managed to preserve that wit throughout the entire feature – or, God forbid, just been about a conversation between this goofball and these two faithful people – it might have been decent, if a bit didactic. There are only so many ways one can make that one Family Guy episode when Meg becomes a born-again Christian seem novel in a new context, and it isn’t just by launching a line of A24 scented candles alongside it (and you fucking know they are on that shit like white on rice on a polished plate in a snowstorm).
No, it’s when Beck and Woods remember that they’re directing a H-O-R-R-O-R picture and not a feature-length adaptation of a Sam Harris podcast that Heretic goes off the rails. The Dial-A-Cliché hotline hold times must have been off the hook while they were writing the film’s back half. We’ve got creepy ladies, full of black goo and crackling bones, light ultraviolence, and a whole lot of suggestions that there might be a more exciting film to be made if Beck and Woods weren’t so goddamned coy about everything. The revelations are cop-outs in the dullest ways possible, conforming to expectations once you start hearing lines that sound like they came out of a C-tier copypasta penned by a fifteen-year-old who just read The God Delusion. The point made is facile and legitimately acknowledged by the three major religions cited here as a requirement for faith and its practice. Did you guys know you must submit to a higher power to worship God properly? Holy shit, right? What a trenchant insight!
This feels like a strange consequence of secularization: We’re so oddly estranged from religion as a cultural modus operandi in the media world that the specifics of worship and dogma get buried under a heaping pile of ignorant faux-discovery, re-learning the old lessons as if we discovered them ourselves. Any person who’s had some amount of religious experience would counter Grant’s ideas about the Mormon Church’s changing beliefs about polygamy as a natural part of religion. There were dozens of books tossed out of the canonical Bible before it was solidified as a text, and the reinterpretation of religious laws is a frequent debate among all faiths. If the hypocrisy bothers someone, they tend to fall on the human side of human-divine interactions, imperfect translations of “perfect” ideals. Such ideals grow and alter with our understanding of ourselves, and this is an observation that becomes pretty clear when you’re older than the age of 18, or if you happen to be a member of an insular religious group. This is why the Mormons are in the spotlight here – they’re the punching bag of choice because they’re visible, and their religion came of age in the era after the printing press. People have been debunking Mormonism quite literally since it began, and yet they believe.
Using that as a resolution is anathema to Beck and Woods’s goals for the film: Had they made the PureFlix version of this film, it sure as hell wouldn’t have been picked up by A24, and it’d be unsatisfying dramatically if Grant won in a Haneke-like fashion. Instead, they pursue ambiguity to the bitter end, but a mundane version of it that borders on the insulting. The truth is that very few people who make movies like this want to be blasphemous or do anything genuinely strange: it’s bizarre to consider that Pixar’s Soul has a non-conformist version of the afterlife, one that was pretty much accepted as a metaphorical device rather than prophecy by its audience, and Beck and Woods wimp out when it comes to the fantastical.
This division between established belief and potential reality is where the conflict in religious horror begins to emerge (see the numerous films about former believers confronting that, in their reality, the nuts and bolts of their faith exist). The established scenario is quite good for it. A doubter, a naif, a zealot: What happens when they confront the “truth” about God or heaven or whatever? What if one of them is right? What if none of them are? What does that say about belief and its endurance? Surely, it’d make Grant’s Monopoly metaphors pay off in the long run. But the rights to “Creep” don’t come cheap, especially when you’re pairing it with “The Air That I Breathe,” and you’re either going to have to sell a lot of tickets or a bunch of blueberry pie-scented candles to pay off Thom Yorke and company.