Whisper House Press

Thanks to A24, I’ve seen the new movie Heretic twice in the past week, and I liked it both times.

The story here is of two LDS/”Mormon” missionaries from Utah visiting Boulder, CO to evangelize on behalf of their faith. (The film was shot in British Columbia, but the production captures the “We’ve got money and are thus living without cares” Boulder vibe. It’s pretty, too, like B.C. and CO). These two young women are earnest but are definitely holding something of themselves back from one another. As the trailer suggests, they visit the wrong house and find sexy, sexy Hugh Grant being totally evil but hiding it sort-of well.

The hour-fifty-minute run time moves quickly, but here’s where we notice the first excellent element of this film.

Sound design works in the film’s favor: the silences are drawn and effective, and the tonal shifts assisted through or sustained by sound work. There are no annoying jump-scares. The camera work is emotionally evocative and directs the audience’s attention subtly where it needs to be subtle and more forcefully when that’s needed. The edits work: the cuts effectively manage the mood of the film and support its story. The acting? Superb. If they handed out awards in the mainstream for horror acting, Hugh Grant and Chloe East would both be in the running. (Sophie Thatcher was no slouch, either, but what’s with “My eyes tell you I am beginning to cry” at every turn?)

The one place where I wished for more oomph was in the dialogue. I won’t spoil the film for you, but I will say that there’s a point at which sexy, sexy Hugh Grant delivers a bad-guy speech that most of us could have delivered in our “we know everything now” first year of college; it comes off that way, anyhow, which doesn’t work for his character. He’s supposed to come off as jaded and wise (in his dark way), but he comes off as intellectually amateurish, and this renders the idea that the young women he’s trying to outsmart might best him him all the more likely. Put another way, and without spoiling who comes out on top, I’d say that it was at that moment I knew the women he’d trapped would have the upper hand through much of the story. This part of the story was broken, and it should have been caught in developmental edits.

Despite this complaint, I found Heretic to be a new take on the “young women captured by crazy older man” psychological thriller sub-genre of horror… is that a sub-genre or a sub-sub genre? or sub³-genre? Anyhow, it did some interesting, new things in a storyline I thought I might have recognized. It’s definitely worth your watch.