It’s been a great year for horror, don’t you think? There’s always a market for formulaic slasher/monster movies with potential for endless sequels, but 2024 has seen some notable successes that buck that trend. LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL, LONGLEGS, THE SUBSTANCE… it’s been a blast. And you can add one more to that (short and by no means exhaustive) list – HERETIC.
Two young religious women are drawn into a game of cat-and-mouse in the house of a strange man.
I’ll admit, I was far from a fan of HUGH GRANT when I was younger. He was the funny, good looking, and charmingly awkward face of the kinds of feel-good movies I tended to avoid like the plague. I still do, actually. I’m very open minded when it comes to films (Christ, I saw WICKED last night and had a great time with it), but I draw the line at RICHARD CURTIS rom-coms and the like. Awful, syrupy, contrived nonsense. I’d unfairly written Grant off, but some of his more recent roles have changed my opinion. From his villainous performance in the magnificent PADDINGTON 2 (his cameo at the end of PADDINGTON IN PERU was the best part of that travesty), to his campaigning work against the UK’s appalling right-wing gutter press, he’s proved himself to have phenomenal depth and appeal. HERETIC cements that reputation further.
Written and directed by SCOTT BECK and BRYAN WOODS, the film is essentially a three-hander. It’s tense and thoughtful, with an increasingly claustrophobic atmosphere. SOPHIE THATCHER and CHLOE EAST are superb as a pair of young Mormon missionaries who are both beginning to doubt their brainwashed upbringings and ask questions of themselves and their religion. This is a film that, initially, asks the kind of questions that horror films typically don’t, and a sense of mounting dread is intelligently engineered through the interactions of the girls and the overly welcoming Mr Reed (GRANT). It’s pretty clear the direction the story is likely to take from the outset, but it does that via a route that’s unexpected and wildly entertaining.
In common with a lot of genre films, the denouement doesn’t quite deliver on the promise of the set up. The third act relies on a mix of more standard horror cliches and tropes, but they’re delivered with care and skill, and the investment you’ve put into the characters from the outset really helps hammer the finale home.
I thoroughly recommend HERETIC. If you haven’t seen it, I believe it’s streaming on MAX (SKY in the UK, I think), from 10 December.
