Hugh Grant is seriously scary in his first horror film

HERETIC ★★★½

(MA) 112 minutes

As a Hollywood screenwriting team, Scott Beck and Bryan Woods had their first major success with the 2018 creature feature A Quiet Place, about alien monsters ready to slaughter you the moment you make a sound. Heretic, which they jointly wrote and directed, relies on the opposite gimmick: the monster is eager for conversation and the best chance of survival is to keep him talking.

At first, he doesn’t look like a monster at all. His name is Mr Reed and he’s played by Hugh Grant as the picture of harmlessness, a beaming old gent in a hideous checked cardigan and double-bridged glasses that look as if he got them long ago in England through the National Health.

When two young women come to his door to spread the word about the Church of Latter-Day Saints, he invites them in for a chinwag and a slice of the blueberry pie his wife is supposedly baking in the next room.

Is there really a pie? Does he really have a wife? These are among the questions of belief and doubt tackled in the ensuing theological wrangle between Reed and his guests, the perky yet sheltered Sister Paxton (Chloe East) and the slightly worldlier Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher).

A student of comparative religion, Reed leaps on his chance to mansplain Mormonism to the pair, who we soon discover are a captive audience in a literal sense. We also discover Reed is less a believer in any established faith than a would-be god in his own right – imposing his will on his prisoners like Jigsaw in the Saw films, if a little less gruesomely.

This is a well-acted movie all round, but primarily a vehicle for Grant – who has played his share of comic villains, but has rarely been asked to be seriously scary. Rather than dialling back his familiar mannerisms, he pushes them into grotesque caricature: Reed’s apologetic grimaces and stuttering false starts advertise a patently phony harmlessness, while the camera prowls around his cosy suburban cottage seeking clues to what lies beneath.

In the film’s slightly drawn-out middle section, Beck and Woods risk falling a little too in love with this character, the way Reed is in love with the sound of his voice. The danger is that the fun of seeing Grant turn evil will outweigh any sense of the character as a threat – and that his elaborately blasphemous monologues will register purely as jokey rants, rather than the genuine provocations they’re seemingly meant to be.

Still, Heretic has its authentically chilling side, arising less from anything Reed has to say than from how metaphysical fears are dramatised in grimly physical terms. Barred from leaving the way they came in, the heroines are forced to move from one room of the house to the next searching for an exit, knowing all the while they may merely be headed further into darkness. Whether you take it literally or as metaphor, that’s the kind of horror that works for me.

Heretic is released in cinemas on November 28.

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