Say your prayers because Hugh Grant will scare the devil out of you (2024)

Holy hell, this film was scary. Now, I know this statement might have worked better had I placed it a few lines into the review and not as the introduction, once I'd explained the plot and you understood that it's about two missionaries being terrorised by the person they think they're successfully converting.

There are those films over the years that get picked up as "watercooler moments", the films everyone at work talks about, that friends ask if you've seen so they can pick your brain about what you thought, think those first few M Night Shyamalan films, and I have a feeling the new Hugh Grant film Heretic might just become one of those, it feels so very of-the-moment.

It is about to be blizzard weather in the middle American town that Mormon missionaries Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East) are doing their year of service in.

They haven't had much luck in making any converts to their church, only in enduring bullying and harassment from the town's other 19-year-olds, and through this hardship the pair seem to have formed a nice supportive friendship even if they wouldn't naturally gravitate towards each other without their mission placing them together.

But they've gotten a lead for a man interested in chatting and so they take their bicycles out to the suburbs where, in an enormous Spanish Mission house on a cliffside, Mr Reed (Hugh Grant) opens the door and welcomes them in.

Following church protocols, the girls aren't supposed to enter the home of a man alone, but Mr Reed assures them his wife is home, baking a blueberry pie in the kitchen, and so they agree to come in.

Mr Reed seems to know plenty about religion and has lots of questions to pose to the two young women about their God and their faith.

In fact, Mr Reed could, it seems, lead a university course in theology, and it doesn't seem so much that he was interested in being converted to the Mormon faith and perhaps this is some kind of game to him.

And where is Mrs Reed, and perhaps the girls ought to call someone from the Church and let them know where they are.

Heretic is written and directed by a duo, Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, and it is interesting to think of both their screenplay and their directing work as a game for two players.

Because gamification is one of the ideas, the many ideas, they explore in the script.

Mr Reed is indeed playing with these two kids, and it's not just a bit of mental chess to keep a suburban househusband amused.

Heretic is dark, certainly in the way plenty of horror films co-opt the ceremony and iconography of religion as set dressing, but also as a warning to the dangers lurking out in suburbia, and it's not hard to see it allegorically about the darker side of America's recent political leanings.

Beck and Woods direct the film like a game too, and I want to visit the film again, perhaps multiple times, to study their camera moves which are sometimes obvious simple chess moves - the camera slides two pieces to the left - and sometimes the moves are more complex.

Beck and Woods have been an inseparable combo since they penned the script for A Quiet Place and with Heretic they've created something original and really meaty to mentally chew on.

This performance marks another career resurgence for Hugh Grant who we've had in our pop-culture lives for about four decades. He's been a bad boy in the tabloids, he's been the angry man ranting against the tabloids, all of this gives weight to the richness of his characterisation here.

Both of the young women are superlative playing against Grant, and Chung Chung-hoon's cinematography pulls you deeper into the dark chess game on the screen.