Heretic
From Little Red Riding Hood being warned to be careful on her way through the woods on the way to Grandma’s house and the boy who cried wolf once too often to the harbinger at the gas station near The Cabin in the Woods, horror has always been about cautionary tales of what might happen to the bad boys and good girls who don’t listen to the advice they are given, who push ahead despite the signs that tell them that this is a bad idea.
Eager members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Sisters Barnes and Paxton are visiting houses to hand out pamphlets and spread the good word of God, Mister Reed having previously indicated that he would be interested in a meeting at his cliff-top home, inviting the girls inside with the assurance that his wife will join them presently as soon as she has finished baking.
Their host at first genial if a little eccentric, what starts as a conversation of general spiritual beliefs and wellbeing is a series of traps for the two young women, lured in by promises of blueberry pie and the promises which form the surface of their beliefs but then having their fundamental preconceptions challenged by a duplicitous man who has explored every facet of their religion, and all others, and found them insufficient, wanting to test their falsehoods, boundaries and possibilities.
Principally a claustrophobic three-hander starring Cloud Atlas’ Hugh Grant as the devious Mister Reed against The Exorcist‘s Sophie Thatcher and The Wolf of Snow Hollow‘s Chloe East as the young women whose increasingly tenuous beliefs may be their only protection, Sister Barnes in particular analytical and improvising counter-arguments while Sister Paxton is less sure of herself, Heretic is written and directed with measured assurance by 65’s Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, the stone walls of Mister Reed’s isolated home offering protection against the gathering storm outside but little comfort.
A rare alternative to the themes of possession, demonic offspring and imminent apocalyptic prophecies which dominate the genre, instead Heretic is an unconventional religious themed horror, an intellectual examination of belief systems and the presumptions and willing blindness of those who subscribe to them, presenting religion as a series of repeating ideas overlaid on earlier systems since antiquity for supposedly more enlightened sensibilities yet still appealing to the same primal needs.
Like Reed’s labyrinthine puzzle of a house, something modern and amenable built over upon a previous deeper structure, unsafe and threatening, with the front door locked Sisters Barnes and Paxton cannot escape from the situation they willingly entered into with naïve good intentions, forced into a dark basement of monstrosities and miracles where they are forced to confront doubts and profound questions of existence and beliefs, and inevitably their own mortality, as is the nature of the beast.
Heretic is currently on general release
