Sunday, 26 October 2025

Heretic (Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, 2024)


Two young Mormon missionaries meet more than they bargained on when they knock on the door of a seemingly charming older Englishman, who engages them in discussion about their faith. They immediately prove no match for neither his verbosity, nor his ability to constantly keep them off balance. Then their discomfort grows more intense when it transpires that they can't leave the house until the morning and thy can't get a phone signal, and so we enter the realm of psychological horror. This does eventually descend into more standard horror, because current horror films simply demand bloodletting, which is a shame, but Hugh Grant is marvellous in the role of the host, veering from avuncular and self-effacing to truly menacing at the flick of a switch, and the intelligence of the dialogue is far, far beyond that of the modern genre norm. Also on the plus side, it clearly scared the shit out of countless reactionary U.S. Christians when it dissected their myths, and the pound of flesh they got with the full revelation of the captor's sociopathic egotism just wasn't enough for them.

7/10

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