House of God: Review of Heretic
Illustration by Michael DiMilo
★★★★1/2
By Geoff Carter
“Two young women working as missionaries for the Church of Latter-Day Saints—the Mormons—enter the home of a charming middle-aged man and soon find they have walked into the devious puzzle box of a religious fanatic, that they are prisoners of a madman.”
This could be the logline or part of a press release for the movie Heretic, but it doesn’t begin to do the film justice. Yes, it is a horror film, a thriller, as scary a basement you’ll find this side of Silence of the Lambs, and the mother of all haunted house movies, but it is also much more than that. This film also—thanks to its slippery protagonist—slips into existential areas of religion, self, and power.
The opening sequence the film follows two young missionaries, Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East) as they start on their rounds trying to convert the nonbelievers to Mormonism. They bike around town, have doors shut in their faces, are bullied and embarrassed by town girls, and finally, during a raging thunderstorm, arrive at the home of Mr. Reed, a charming middle-aged man who—refreshingly—seems eager to talk to them. As the girls stand in the rain, waiting a seemingly interminable time for him to unlock the door, they hear an odd series of thumps, bangs, and whirring machinery—foreshadowing for the machinations they are about to face.
After Mr. Reed assures the young women his wife is in the kitchen making blueberry pie and disappears to fetch her, the young women notice there is only one small window in the entire room. Mr. Reed returns, saying his wife is being shy, and they begin an amiable discussion about theology. Barnes and Paxton become uncomfortable after he makes some inappropriate and unnerving comments about the nature of religion, asking them about polygamy, wondering whether it was condoned by Joseph Smith to cover up his extra-marital affairs.
Sister Barnes quite astutely argues that at its inception, the Mormon Church needed people to maintain it, so polygamy was necessary for the church to survive. Once the institution was stable, polygamy was no longer necessary and was so abolished. Reed still maintains it was simply used to legitimize adultery, making Barnes and Paxton even more uncomfortable.
He leaves the room again. Barnes notices that a blueberry pie scented candle is burning and realizes that Mr. Reed has been lying to them. They try to escape but realize they are locked in. They go to the back of the house and discover Mr. Reed in his study, a room suspiciously constructed like a chapel but with two matching doors at the back.
Mr. Reed then presents his theory to Barnes and Paxton that there is only one true religion, using iterations of the board game Monopoly (originally The Landlord Game) to illustrate his point. While these references—especially when it comes to the glossy new specialty games—is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, it is a very apt multi-layered analogy to aspects of commercialism and cooption of religious beliefs. Reed amplifies his theory by maintaining that Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are all iterations—like Monopoly—of the same idea. To underline his point, he throws Paxton’s copy, just another iteration, of The Book of Mormon onto the pile.
The women ask to leave. Reed tells them they can go out through the back, past the two doors which he labels believer and nonbeliever. The doors lead to a basement room with no other exit. Reed suddenly appears and tells the missionaries he will show them the one true religion, that he will prove to his theory to them. A debilitated mute woman appears. Reed says she is a prophet. He gives her the blueberry pie which he says has been poisoned. The woman, he says, will die but then be resurrected and give the girls the secret of the afterlife.
When the prophet arises, she says, “It is not real” which Reed says means they are living in a simulation. Barnes refutes this, saying—based on her own experience—that the prophet’s words parallel a near-death experience.
At this point in Mr. Reed’s sadistic exercise in theological semantics, Barnes rebels. Paxton then starts to unravel Reed’s convoluted plot. She descends deeper (Dante’s Inferno?) below the basement until she unpeels the layers of Reed’s “truth”.
While the ending takes a decided turn toward a more conventional horror movie conclusion, Scott Beck and Bryan Wood’s screenplay provides a marvelously incisive dissection of religion, power, and the nature of belief that borders on the ironic but merrily dances on the edge of satire. The foundation of this inquiry is Mr. Reed, an embodiment of reason, logic, faith, and evil.
Hugh Grant is nothing short of brilliant as this particularly sadistic theologian. Using the trademark good-natured charm we know from Love Actually, Sirens, Bridget Jones’ Diary, and other romantic comedies, Grant’s Reed is the epitome of British wit, charm, courtesy, and self-effacing naivete, which serves him perfectly as a scheming sadist, sort of like a bumbling Hannibal Lecter. He prefaces awkward questions with apologetic caveats or embarrassed chuckles. Even his dissertations on the nature of religion are not fevered rants, but entirely rational and good-humored lectures.
When the song “The Air that I Breathe” is mysteriously played in Reed’s study as another illustration of his iteration theory—specifically that the song was allegedly plagiarized by Radiohead and Lana Del Rey—even that level of creepiness carries sort of a disarming charm. The sense of impending menace is only enhanced by Grant’s persona. His malevolence is only underlined by Thatcher and East’s stellar performances as the missionaries. Thatcher, in particular, conveys a mysterious layer of worldliness lurking beneath her naivete.
Yet another level of subtext in this production is Mr. Reed’s house. It is a carefully constructed and distinctively odd design of the house, which almost becomes a character unto itself—or perhaps the personification of Mr. Reed’s perverted rationale. Marvelous details like the handmade pendulum catching rainwater in the study (why not fix the roof itself?), or the scale model of the basement with which he traces the movements of Paxton and Barnes, or the intricate sets of timers that regulate the unlocking of the front door reflect not only on the cleverness of our Mr. Reed, but on his monumental ambition.
On a level of sheer realism, the viewer might ask how Mr. Reed got the resources, time, and energy to build such an intricate structure and maintain the human dregs—former victims—which compose his infrastructure. In this light, he becomes more than a sheer human villain. The nightmare he has constructed from the torn pages of bibles and the shards of pop culture—his one true religion—does not only belong to one man. It is a disease permeating our culture, especially recently.
Heretic is a very good film. It, like most good films, challenges the viewer’s assumptions about life, social norms, and her very existence. And God. And it features possibly one of the greatest film villains of all times.
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