c/o Hollywood Reporter
The movie “Heretic” has been universally praised for taking on the complex themes of religion and delivering “cerebral” thrills. Personally, I support just having thrills.
“Heretic” attempts to balance the conventions of horror with the conventions of thrillers, just to make a movie that does nothing altogether. But before I talk about these genres and the lack of any defined thrills in “Heretic,” I really have to start with why I don’t think the movie is thought-provoking at all.
In the lives of most people I know, typically at age six or seven, there was a realization that you could invent a false religion to get people to do what you wanted. Or you’d realize that your friend—who’d made up a false religion—was just using it to get everyone to do whatever they wanted. I had more than a few friends who did the former, and thus I was a kid who was part of the latter group. All this is to say that to see religion as a form of societal control is so basic it almost makes me cringe. It’s not this idea’s accuracy that I dispute, but rather that “Heretic” thinks that we haven’t thought about this thoroughly enough already. The hypothetically cerebral theme of “Heretic” is like a liberal saying that they just realized the electoral college was biased towards conservatives.
Regardless, “Heretic” never goes beneath the surface of religion. If it wants to truly “thrill” me “cerebrally,” it needs to have a grander and more horrifying vision of history than its screenwriters are capable of. In fact, the film’s screenwriters—who co-directed too—don’t really seem capable of anything. These supposedly cerebral thrills are more likely to compensate for the fact that they couldn’t come up with an idea that could thrill at all.
If we were to judge “Heretic” as a traditional thriller—and for now, let’s say that we can—then it would be thrilling if it showed characters, who we hypothetically care about, getting put in a bad situation. For example, in the movie “Dream Lover” (one of my favorite thrillers from the 1990s), James Spader almost immediately becomes a real person to the audience. You don’t need much context to become immersed in his life and his twists and turns. He is an architect, and he is in love with the girl that is the titular “dream lover,” but that isn’t all that he is. As he falls into more and more traps, you feel his pain; every movement and phrase of his could be real.
In comparison, the two missionary girls in “Heretic” are far too stiff. They have a charming and relatable conversation at the very beginning, (the best scene in the movie) and suddenly, you feel something for them. Yet, this relatability ends the second they enter the house and simply become pawns. They then become as smart or dumb, as edgy or basic as the plot needs them to be, not real people besides what the film requires of them. The reason why the movie’s thrills are called “cerebral” is that you really can only relate to these two girls on an intellectual level, and nothing more. There are other girls later in the movie who you relate to more, because all you see is their pain and their humanity; however, those other girls are barely in it—you are meant to care about the girls trying to escape, not these side characters.
“Heretic” has also been called a horror movie. If it was a horror movie, then I don’t think these rules would need to apply. There is a very big difference between being thrilled and getting scared. Thrills have more rules packed inside of them, and horror is the strange thing that we can almost never get ahold of.
Some of the best horror movies have scared the audience by simply being as strange as possible. The problem is that “Heretic” could never really count as a horror movie because everything is laid out for us too neatly. This situation wouldn’t happen to 99% of viewers, because we aren’t Mormon missionaries. The fear of the unknown is taken from us when we realize that, other than the villain’s sociopathic atheism, he is fairly logical. That is, once you accept Hugh Grant’s rules, he never strays from them. He has a singular motive and is fairly predictable in how he follows it. This makes every twist in “Heretic” completely predictable. Part of the horror of “Midsommar” is that there is just a cult doing all of these strange, weird, and disgusting things, and we are left with the question of what anyone is going to do next. It makes the viewing experience that much more suspenseful.
Speaking of “Midsommar,” I am starting to feel that A24, the production company behind “Heretic” and “Midsommar,” has become its own religion. I have never liked the vast majority of their movies (though I really, really love “20th Century Women”) but I used to appreciate A24 more. Lately, their movies have gotten more incomprehensible, and just so distant from people or feelings. I keep expecting for these movies to get bad reviews, and yet nobody gives them. Just like the religions that Hugh Grant critiques, A24 has suddenly turned into gospel. I cannot find one person who did not at least consider falling asleep during “Janet Planet,” yet somehow every critic has given it great reviews. The only explanation that I can possibly understand is that critics are on the defense from the just-as-awful-if-not-worse IP blockbuster event movies that are similarly ruining the state of filmmaking, and thus they feel the need to defend anything that could possibly justify itself as “art.”
Anyway, Hugh Grant as Mr. Reed is a great aspect of “Heretic,” and the Mormon actresses are also very good. The plot is well constructed and, all things considered, it moves quickly. I have a feeling that “Heretic” is just one of the first of a long line of increasingly boring and artistic “thriller” movies. Perhaps, in 10 years, I could see myself getting tricked into thinking that it wasn’t that bad.
Henry Kaplan can be reached at hrkaplan@wesleyan.edu.