Heretic: A Philosophical Review

Author’s Note: The movie Heretic focuses on Mormonism, but the script puts the faith in its place as coming after Islam as yet another revelation. The film uses the vehicle of Mormon missionaries going door-to-door as a way to broach some bigger questions. I have a soft spot for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, not only because we have some Mormon friends, but because I have read the 1945 book, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, by Fawn Brody. This biography is essential reading for anyone wanting to know about the beginnings of a faith created by an obvious huckster and sex fiend. The story is fascinating and upsetting in equal measure.

Several Mormons that I have had the honor to call friends have admitted to me that, underneath their outward profession of faith, they are essentially unbelievers, but to proclaim such would be to lose lifelong friends and family forever. To me, this is a testament to the evil undertones of Mormonism, but also any faith that maintains such strong in-group biases. Of course, sending children out into the dark world to make converts is horrible, dangerous, and deeply manipulative, but then, the virtues of any faith are apparent in what their followers are expected to do to win converts. 

The cinematic universe rarely delves into the realm of philosophy and religion; when it does, it is hard to think that what is made will be in any way intellectually engaging. Some of the fare is blatant evangelical nonsense, like “God’s Not Dead” and its abhorrent sequels. Movies like this ply viewers with saccharine plots about unbelievers who lost their faith when something bad happened to them. We are expected to watch in abject credulity as the hard-hearted protagonist finds their faith again, after their grief is used as an expedient to foist born-again dogma on them. These “movies” only meet the definition of ‘cinema’ in the loosest sense. Badly scripted and horrendously acted, they are glorified ad campaigns—bankrolled by wealthy evangelical groups—and are transparent cheese fests. Only a simpleton (presumably, those for whom the movies are made) wouldn’t see through the hucksterism and casuistry of the same old con done up in cinematic lights.

Other religious films attempt to adapt parts of the Bible for the silver screen. Done less as an attempt to win converts than as blatant cash grabs on stories everyone is already familiar with, they are no less cheesy, but usually not so preachy. We might mention The Passion of the Christ, Noah, The Ten Commandments, and The Greatest Story Ever Told as notable examples. Hardly more watchable than the aforementioned straight-to-DVD ad campaigns, mainstream productions don't touch the depth of personal belief so much as exploit stories for box office success. Whether assuming, (as it used to be) that everyone is Catholic, or making the born-again characters in a story the butt of ongoing jokes in the script, all of it is enough to keep evangelicals in fits of foam-flecked rage. None of it gets to the foundational questions of faith in an objective or rational way.

I was hopeful about The Most Reluctant Convert: The Untold Story of C.S. Lewis,  despite the garish “untold” part, which everyone who knows anything about Lewis already knows. It is true that Lewis was an atheist and came back to faith with support from his friends, among them J.R.R. Tolkien. The movie skimps on the details provided openly by Lewis and never gets to the quality of his real battles with faith. If I had heroes, both Lewis and Tolkien would be on the list. I’ve read everything I can get my hands on by or about both men, including collections of their correspondence. The movie unfairly dramatized what were friendships based on literature, language, and writing, rather than faith. The viewer will either think that Lewis’s atheism was not sincere or that his faith was thin and insipid. Neither has the merit of being even close to the truth.

Then, I came across a movie that had a little fanfare but seemed to cause discomfort with viewers beyond its ‘horror/thriller’ genre because it allegedly asked serious questions about religion and faith. Heretic (2024), starring Hugh Grant and written by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, appeared to finally be a movie willing to dissect the religious impulse and challenge belief structures, at least based on the trailer.

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The story centers around two Mormon missionaries, Sister Paxton and Sister Barnes, as they go about their routine movements of daily mission work. They discuss visiting the home of a prospective convert who agreed to have a chat about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at an earlier time. After a brief debate, they finally decide to visit Mr. Reed (Grant), in obviously destabilizing weather. As they wait for Reed to answer the door, the viewer gets the sense that the opening scenes have all the hallmarks of Hansel and Gretel wandering into the forest and foolishly knocking at the gingerbread house. 

At first, Reed outwardly professes to be very interested in the questions of faith. In what may be unintended nods at M. Night Shyamalan or Alfred Hitchcock, the tone darkens quickly, and the viewers are made to feel immediately as though something is off and nothing is as it appears.

Reed is welcoming, appears genuinely interested in the discussion, and eases their discomfort about being in a home with a male without another woman present by telling them that his wife is baking a pie, but is feeling a bit shy. His initial disarming and friendly demeanor takes on the slightest edge as he proves that he knows much about the beginnings of the faith. He asks hard, probing questions about the most problematic parts of their faith. The more Reed goes on, the more uncomfortable his visitors become, and when he leaves the front room, ostensibly to get his wife at their request, they try to leave. Realizing that the key to their bike lock was left in their coats, which Reed took for them, they decide to leave the bikes and walk the few miles back to their church. The nervous sisters find the front door locked and realize that their only way out is through the house.

As the tension and mystery build, Reed invites them into the “kitchen” to meet his wife. Hesitating, they fake a phone call and tell him they are being demanded to return to their church. Reed admits that the front door is on a timer and cannot be opened until the next day and invites the missionaries to leave via the back door. They are ushered through a dark corridor into a library that feels very much like the sanctuary of a small church, and where Reed informs them that there is metal in the walls and ceiling that blocks phone signals. 

The walls of the second room are covered with religious iconography, and behind an altar set with candles, there are two doors. Reed goes on with his college-level discourse dismantling monotheism, describing how each subsequent variant from Judaism through to Islam and then to Mormonism, are iterations of the former, each more tawdry and harder to believe.

After a compelling rant, in which Reed also dismantles the idea of Jesus as having been based on previous historical and mythical beings with similar powers, he writes a message on each door. On one, he scribes Belief and on the other Disbelief. The missionary sisters are then compelled to choose one or the other based on how his message has shaken or reinforced their faith. Having gazed into the space beyond the doors already, when trying to leave, they are confused and frightened and well aware that they are more like flies in a web than unwary visitors in the home of an eccentric.

Here is where the movie drops its pretense and moves from a theological thriller to a ‘horror’ movie. I won’t give away what comes next, because I believe that it is worth seeing at least once, if one has the intestinal fortitude to withstand the disappointment. Yet, as the film transitions, the intellectual game of the first part starts to feel strained, then abstract, and finally disintegrates into something more tedious than harrowing. By the end, everything that we’ve heard and witnessed feels like cotton candy in the rain.

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Despite being well crafted and even well written, Heretic makes several mistakes that cause the film to feel disingenuous. Behind the intellectual rigor of the first half lies a film that is about a final girl escaping the clutches of a madman. It pretends to have equal depth at the end but perpetrates a kind of cinematic bait and switch. By subtle hints and clues, it shows itself for what it is, even from the beginning. It turns out to be no less tropey (and sometimes hokey) than any other selection from the genre. Proof that the movie producers think we, the viewers—perhaps like those who fall for televangelists—are imbeciles. 

The sister missionaries in the film, who are outwardly naive and innocent, are shown as more worldly than they let on. Reed, despite his outward appearance of wanting to have a chat about faith, is openly nefarious, barely keeping his devilish glee under wraps. At several points, the camera shows the viewer lovingly—almost lingeringly—where Chekov’s pistols are in the first few moments of the movie, so that we will know that the item is of importance to the progress. Discordant plot notes clumsily underscore the entire affair, but never so much as when, wet with freezing rain, the two sister missionaries debate departing before Reed ever answers his door.  This kind of hand-holding in script writing is why people are disappointed with movies these days. 

I watched the film with a desire, I think, to find something truly mindblowing at the end; to have learned a lesson, or to have had strongly-held beliefs challenged. I thought, at least at first, that the plot would reveal that Reed had churned up some ancient and therefore foundational mysteries and, like a character in a Lovecraft story, would say the archaic spell and bring up some horrible chthonic deity from out of space and time. Cosmic horror would have been an ideal climax for a movie that seeks, at least initially, to poke holes in grounded faith and belief. Hugh Grant as Reed perfectly captures the manic and obsessed antiheroes of Lovecraft, especially as he systematically dismantles the outward edifices of religion. 

My hopes were dashed.

The movie swings too hard from mystical topics to an unbelievable tale about a serial killer who has fallen for his own ridiculous religious delusions. Finding that his research inevitably leads him nowhere, his need to find meaning from nothing causes him to lose his mind. Thus, he kidnaps two young women to force the illusion of his own unbelievable faith on them in a bizarre reversal of their missionary work. 

As an analogy for the worn-out apologetics for the silly supernatural claims of religion, the film clearly shows to what level some people will take their belief to keep finding justification to believe it. Faith of that kind—that depends upon miracles—is merely self-delusion in a form that is palatable to the general public. As with any such dance, the effort gives diminishing returns. In that way, Reed exemplifies humanity's tendency to invent increasingly irrational beliefs as past faiths are exposed as man-made, rather than turning to embrace rationality and reason. This is the realm of madness, carefully composed under the fake calm of falsely modest piety, just waiting to find an excuse to kill in the name of its new god or revelation.

Like religious dogma, any horror movie where the young female protagonists fall into the clutches of a madman, the characters must obey certain immutable rules. At some point in the script, it is obvious that only one of them will survive. In Heretic, it was clear almost from the outset which one it would be, but even so, the writers did try to throw the viewer off the scent.

Between them, Sister Paxton and Sister Barnes are not so much friends as merely thrust together by the rules of their shared faith. Sister Paxton is timid, naive, even a little immature, whereas Sister Barnes seems to have a little worldliness tucked under her prim black jumper. With worldliness, though, comes the rough backstory that is intended to make the audience think she will crack under Reed’s onslaught of logic.

The movie got the doe-eyed innocent part for Mormon missionaries right, but what it also did, as they wandered through the nightmare of Mr. Reed’s labyrinthine house, was show how faith becomes a choice rather than an obligation. The missionaries are trained to proselytize at their targets (marks?) until they choose to join Mormonism. One of the flaws of religion is that when one chooses to leave the faith—becomes an apostate in their former faith group—one loses their community. The sisters in the film, had a choice to enter Reed’s house, but the choice to leave was fraught with brutal consequences. 

My thoughts on this film are mixed. As the final scene goes dark with collapsing scenery, nothing is resolved. Cinematic symbolism, ever immutable, shows that the storm that trapped them is over and the sun is shining, but the butcher’s bill has yet to be tallied. By ending on somewhat of a cliffhanger, this movie skates free of the consequences of its actions, but does so with intent. How many times have we seen televangelist preachers shown for the greedy monsters they are, but all too soon, they are back on TV hoodwinking others? Quite often. Religion, for all it professes to be a force for good in the world, is guilty of unthinkable disgraces, supporting genocides, authoritarian leaders, murder, hatred, bigotry, misogyny, and war, and yet, we blink and look past all that because we like the sense of fellowship and belonging to something bigger than ourselves. That blinking is a choice, too.

Heretic is not like other films, in that it really does try to break down religious belief into something that is clearly man-made, but it proposes nothing in its place. Because the players are, in essence, all deluded to some degree, the idea that rationalism, skepticism, and reason are options for them is a foregone conclusion. In the end, this movie boils all strong beliefs down to the marrow of madness, but whether we continue to break bones to feast on the marrow is not obligatory, but a choice. The movie broke some tropes, at least at first, by being willing to confront these questions, but it didn’t go far enough to resolve or answer the final queries it made. I like to think this is because the final questions that we face are also not resolved. However, for all its initial bluster, Heretic faded to something silly and unrecognizable, but then, maybe that is a final analogy of religion and faith, too.