One of the great benefits of watching too many movies are all the life lessons they impart. For instance, if your host mentions that the walls of his house happened to be lined with metal, you should immediately feign a headache and split before he closes the front door. If the windows in his house look too small even for a child to squeeze through, you should also exit. And if there’s also a framed image of hell on a wall, you should definitely conk him on his head and run. That said, if the host is played by Hugh Grant, you may want to stick around.
From the moment that the two young women in “Heretic” introduce themselves to Mr. Reed — played by a wily, exuberantly vamping Grant — it’s obvious that the smart thing would be for them to say, oops and sorry, wrong address. They don’t, of course, because they’re delectably juicy bait, and the horror genre demands at least a pound or two of ravaged flesh, just like life itself. So, the women enter the house smiling, and they keep on smiling, as if they were asking for the inevitable ultraviolence, the kind of splatter and spurt that can transform an outwardly ordinary home into dangerous ground and, in time, a bloody slaughterhouse.
As soon as they appear onscreen, the women, a pair of missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, start warming up the movie — and your sympathies — with pleasantly innocuous talk. They’re sweet and eager, even if Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) has a wary mien and darting gaze that don’t jibe with her more incautious companion, Sister Paxton (Chloe East). Having been called to serve, the two have been wheeling their bikes around Anytown America and head over shortly to Mr. Reed’s. He’s requested some information about their church so before long they’re exchanging pleasantries in his home, a gloomy space with the yellowish, crepuscular lighting of a 1990s David Fincher film.
The queasy lighting — like Mr. Reed’s oddly small windows and metal-lined walls — would give most sensible women pause, but the writer-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods haven’t designed Barnes and Paxton to be prudent. The women are prim, proper, outwardly trusting; they’re on a mission and true believers. They’re also women, so, you know, they’re built for niceness. For propriety’s sake, they don’t want to be alone with Mr. Reed — they politely ask him if his unseen, unheard wife can join them — but because they’re committed to teaching the gospel, they stay. Their faith makes them innocent or so they seem, which makes them catnip to Mr. Reed, whose wide smile and wild eyes quickly grow wider and wilder.
It’s a clever setup that Beck and Woods tease as “Heretic” gets down to its scary business. Many of the earlier scenes take place in Mr. Reed’s living room, a tight, funereal space that — as he begins courteously, then aggressively to challenge them on religious matters — becomes increasingly claustrophobic. It grows even more airless as he continues provoking them, and the filmmakers shift from Mr. Reed’s slyly smiling face to each woman’s worried one, editing that binds them closer together as if with a rope. By the time they slip in a shot of a miniature model of Mr. Reed’s house, it seems clear that the hexagonal shape of his tiny window is an appreciative nod to the patterned carpet in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.”
At first, the three characters largely engage in some lightly amusing if torturous theological wrangling, a focus that nicely builds suspense as Mr. Reed becomes progressively more insistent, pushy and exceedingly nasty. Grant is clearly having a lot of fun in “Heretic,” and it’s enjoyable watching him go hard here with cold, predatory eyes and a smile that turns from uneasily friendly to straight-up fiendish. Grant has loosened up as he’s grown older, as if he were no longer inhibited by the burdens of playing the desirable, predictable romantic lead. He isn’t trying to seduce anyone in “Heretic.” No matter. Even as the movie dribbles into disappointing familiarity, the pleasure he exudes as an irredeemable fiend is plenty seductive.
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