Review: HERETIC

Two young Mormon conversion units knock on the door of the highly affable Mr Reed. He has signalled his interest in a visit and is up for a chat. It's raining hard at the doorstep but they tell him there needs to be a woman present if they are to come in. He says his wife is at home and, satisfied, they settle on his living room couch and begin discussing religion with the waft of blueberry pie coming in from the kitchen. Or is it? There are the usual awkward silences and looks that happen when strangers meet in unfamiliar settings. Then, Mr Reed asks about historical polygamy, the spectre of which still haunts the church, displaying a scholarly knowledge of Mormonism. Sisters Barnes and Paxton are initially impressed but begin noticing things are not quite right. There's a fair bit of detail about this in the trailer but I'll leave it blank here.

This is an A24 thriller. The company that brought you some remarkable genre cinema over the past decade and a bit but also the daggy oldie's term elevated horror, has been on the trail of expanding its brief toward the genre defying goal of good cinema. Mostly that's been seen to with great moments like Pearl. Then, there's this.

Heretic gets to work quickly, dropping Chekovian guns into every opening scene and guiding us with a gentle curve to the point where the weirdness pushes against a tightening tension that bursts in the second act only to be resolved for good or ill in the third. All of this is handled confidently by the film to the extent that nothing at all will surprise you about it. It's like watching the clock that you hear ticking throughout, it's going to keep on working.

Comparisons are odious but I can't sit here and not mention that Barbarian from a few years back managed to wrong foot its audiences near constantly, blowing initial expectations way out of proportion, yet brought everything back home. Heretic attempts this a few times but there is such a lack of tension throughout and the stakes keep getting punctured that the only thing to get on edge about it the theological proposition developing in the dialogue.

Hugh Grant's goofy Englishness pitted against the sinister scheme he's plotting should work better than it does but you just keep wanting to like him. The young women are presented in cliché form, one pious, the other worldly, but this runs into trouble quickly. One character, given advice by the other of how to handle the situation starts doing so in a writerly sudden character development; her change is like a swimmer sprouting fins to evade a shark. It soon feels like an overall essay about the nature of religion using a few nominated characters to mouth declarations and counter arguments. Even the potentially interesting theoretical hijacks feel like they were shouted into inclusion during an all night session in the writers' room over some brews and a lot of muscle relaxants. The whole thing ends up feeling like a challenge to make an a24 thriller based on an essay on belief. Here's a proposition: if you believe you will be surprised by this film's plot, you will be; if you don't believe that, you won't be.