The Strange Faith Crisis at the Heart of ‘Heretic’

Heretic, the new horror film from A24, which centers around the ill-fated visit of two sister missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to a seemingly innocuous cottage in the woods, has inspired a strange and singular phenomenon. Rarely when we view a film with a villain who has total disregard for human dignity and life do we come away feeling that what the villain expressed must also be the opinions of the filmmakers themselves. We don’t watch The Dark Knight and think Christopher Nolan must want to watch the world burn. We don’t watch The Avengers and think that they hoped the audience would come away agreeing with Thanos’ idea that the world would be better with half as many people. 

Yet, Heretic, which features Hugh Grant in a maniacal role that surprises those who still most closely associate him with titles like Sense and Sensibility and Two Weeks’ Notice, has left many viewers assuming that the film’s thesis is voiced by its villain. That thesis is that all religion is manmade and fundamentally about control.

Why, when the Latter-day Saint missionaries are the protagonists, do people come away saying, “yeah, this movie thinks the villain’s probably right,” even though those same people would never condone the violent actions that he takes to prove his point? And what does it say about us as a society that in mainstream films, where atheism is pitted against faith, atheism must win as an ideological concept, even if its spokesperson is so deeply flawed?

The film starts with a hook that writer-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (A Quiet Place) apparently wrote a decade before embarking on the rest of the film, the idea of a pair of sister missionaries being drawn into a home to discuss religion with someone who turns out to have not only ideas that will challenge them spiritually, but plans that will threaten their very lives. The film acknowledges, but side-steps, the missionary safety rule about having another female in the house in order to teach with a lie from Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant) that his wife is in the other room baking pie. 

The sense of foreboding is immediately palpable, but the horror tropes that increasingly alert the audience that this is a bad situation accelerate alongside an increasingly adversarial discussion from Mr. Reed on the problems he sees with religion. The two run so much in parallel, in fact, that it begins to feel like the fear these young women are clearly feeling is a result of having their beliefs criticized and not the fear for their physical safety. 

They seem to be as much afraid that he is right about their church as they are that he might hurt them, the equating of which is a little insulting considering how much criticism missionaries and members of the Church, in general, hear constantly (his arguments are older news than he thinks) and how much unchecked violence happens against women all the time. In some ways, it would be a male privilege to hear this oration and be more afraid of the ideas than of the locks on every door and the proximity of the unhinged gentleman who clearly has nefarious intent. 

It calls to mind the recent interview from The Graham Norton Show that went viral when actress Saoirse Ronan sat with an otherwise all-male panel listening to them discuss the ridiculousness of self-defense tactics like using the butt of your phone as a weapon. Actor Paul Mescal’s sarcastic response was, “Who’s actually going to think about that? If someone attacks me, I’m not going to go—phone!” The other men in the room proceeded to laugh and act out the supposed silliness of that thought process before Ronan interrupted them by saying, “That’s what girls have to think about all the time,” which left the others speechless and the females in the audience clapping their agreement.

Yes, these missionaries would be in full flight or fight mode, hardly listening to the intricacies of the atheistic argument Mr. Reed gets so much time to lay out. We can assume then, that it is for the audience’s benefit, and not the characters’ that he goes on so long. They give Mr. Reed so much screen time to speak on this topic that it is a full hour into the movie before any more traditional situational horror starts to take place. I saw the film in a Utah cinema and when people started walking out near the beginning, I assumed they were offended Latter-day Saints, but as a few left later on, I began to assume they were bored horror fans who didn’t come here for a lecture.

Yes, it was unusual to give the “baddie” nearly half the film for his big “why I did it” monologue, but it wasn’t the only reason that the audience came away from the film feeling the filmmakers must agree with him. 

Despite a more nuanced than usual depiction of Latter-day Saint characters (sloppy and incorrect references and terminology notwithstanding, CLICK HERE for a great fact checking piece), the film ultimately fell into the trap that seems inevitable when a film weighing atheism against belief is made by non-believers. There is an underlying assumption that a person of faith is just a person who hasn’t suffered enough to realize they’re an atheist yet. 

I don’t think most faithful people assume that all atheists secretly believe in God, but it seems to be the irrevocable mainstream view that if you push a faithful person far enough, they will ultimately admit that their belief was a front all along. 

It is perfectly verbalized by Anthony Hopkins as Sigmund Freud in the 2023 film Freud’s Last Session, an imagined meeting between C.S. Lewis and Freud in the final days of the psychoanalyst’s life. In their day together, an air raid siren sounds, and as they evacuate to a shelter, C.S. Lewis reacts with terror (and what we would identify as PTSD), and later on, Freud criticizes him for showing so much fear: “Where was your great faith? Where was your precious joy in meeting your beloved Creator? Disappeared. Why? Because you know, beyond all your self-protective lies and your fairy tales that he does not exist.”

Even that film, which had such great potential for a debate on equal footing, ultimately came down much more heavily on Freud’s side of the argument, though C.S. Lewis is perhaps the world’s most famous modern example of a person whose life took him the other direction from atheism to faith. 

Heretic, too, as it left some of the lectures behind and began to slap together some blood and gore to appease the genre, wouldn’t let anyone keep their faith. The two missionary protagonists seem to have differing levels of conviction from the beginning. Sister Barnes is a worldly wise and subtly skeptical counterpoint to the endearing naivety of her companion, Sister Paxton, who continues to thank Mr. Reed for his time and his interesting thoughts while trying to flee. 

When (spoiler alert) Sister Paxton is the only one of the two left and bleeding out together with Mr. Reed, who has finally been dealt a deserved blow, he uncharacteristically asks her to pray for them. And even in this moment with the threat so much disarmed, she says, “Prayer doesn’t work” and then describes a scientific experiment that proved it (as though science, and a single experiment no less, would be the thing to trust on such a topic). “Lots of my friends were disappointed when they heard that,” she says, “But I don’t know why. I think … it’s beautiful that people pray for each other, even though we all probably know, deep down, it doesn’t make a difference.”

That is the tiny grain of relatability they seem to be able to grant a once-faithful character. The film makers seem to be telling us that after all she has been through, she can’t possibly have faith, but she can at least express a nice humanist sentiment most people could get on board with. What happens next is actually the biggest surprise of the film to me because they give her a path to rescue that some audiences will interpret as a miraculous answer to that prayer and some as a hallucination, depending on your predisposition. The sudden burst of a hopeful ending makes the movie infinitely better, but the ambiguity of it, paired with how little weight or time they give to the sisters’ beliefs as compared to Mr. Reed’s, ultimately leaves you absolutely clear on which way they lean.

In the end, I saw this film as a call to action for filmmakers of faith. Not to make movies just to clapback at something like Heretic, but to express cinematically the effect and experience of faith, truly felt, even or especially in times of greatest pain and sorrow. It is clear that there is an overwhelming feeling among those in the mainstream media that belief toward unbelief is the only direction the current actually flows and those of us who still believe just haven’t made it far enough down the river yet. 

Little do they know that the very being whose name Christians carry suffered so severely and, in His final moments, called out to, rather than denied, His Father in Heaven. And His ancient apostles faced pain and suffering worthy of the horror genre and yet did not deny the divinity of their master. If faith were solely dependent on things only going well for the faithful, then Christianity would have quickly ended when the Romans were sending Christians to the lions for their beliefs. But the possibility of death by beasts didn’t kill their conviction because not all believers are fair-weather friends of Jesus. Our faith is not solely reliant on our ability to overpower our enemies or live a life free of pain.

But when you don’t believe, that’s hard to understand.

Heretic’s ideological conclusion seems to come down pretty hard on the side of the charming British atheist who is incidentally also a psycho killer. But the seeming inevitability of that outcome doesn’t have to stay an inevitability forever. 

We all have to face “the problem of pain,” but some do it and yet believe. It’s time we saw it on film.