A couple of decades ago, I was growing impatient with Hugh Grant. I found him guilty of giving the same bumbling, stammering performance in Four Weddings and a Funeral, Sense and Sensibility, Notting Hill, Love Actually, and others. No doubt he was very good at it, but he was capable of more, and that was clear even back then. (Seriously, catch his performance as an evil gay theater director in 1995’s An Awfully Big Adventure.) Looking back, maybe that arrest with an L.A. prostitute was his cry for help, an attempt to avoid being pigeonholed as that diffident British toff with the tousled hair.
If it was, he didn’t need to hire a hooker, he just needed to age out of those romantic comedy roles. He cut loose as a Simon Cowell manqué in American Dreamz, as one of Guy Ritchie’s Cockney gangsters in The Gentlemen and Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, and as a bloodthirsty tribal leader in Cloud Atlas. Of course, his turn as an off-his-nut actor in Paddington 2 was pure comedy gold.
In Heretic, he’s given a royal stemwinder of a speech aimed at the two heroines. Ostensibly discussing the human need to believe in a deity, he pulls out a vintage Monopoly set and challenges them to a game, compares the world’s religions to the music of Radiohead and Lana Del Rey, and breaks into an impression of Jar Jar Binks. He says he’s about to tell them something that will make them want to die, and then he punctuates the line with an oversized grimace. It shouldn’t work, but it does thanks to Grant’s comedic skills. A lot of actors couldn’t make this role so funny, and a lot of the ones that could wouldn’t have the testicular fortitude to actually do it. His performance as the monster makes this haunted house movie into a barrel of monkeys.
He portrays Mr. Reed, a man who is visited at his home by Mormon missionaries Sister Paxton (Chloe East) and Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) during a cold, rainy afternoon that gives way to blizzard conditions at night. No sooner does he greet them than he starts grilling them quite hard and knowledgeably about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints’ history with polygamy. This makes them uncomfortable, but not as much as when they realize that Mr. Reed’s wife is not actually baking a blueberry pie in the kitchen — she doesn’t exist, and the blueberry odor is coming from a scented candle. When they try to slip out the front door, they find it locked from the outside.
The filmmaking team of Scott Beck and Bryan Woods wrote the famously dialogue-scanty A Quiet Place and then made their directing debut with the equally sparse and rather underwhelming science-fiction thriller 65. Here they seem to be making up for lost words with a script that is dense with philosophical dialogue. If George Bernard Shaw had written a horror movie, it would be something like this. The movie is stagier than many films that actually originated as stage plays, and horror fans may grow impatient at all the talk. Granted, some of the conversation is quite good, as when Sister Paxton — I have to think that name is a shout-out to the Fort Worth-born star of Big Love — describes finding evidence of God’s existence in a porn video. There’s also an obligatory reference to the Broadway musical The Book of Mormon, and one cool visual when the camera finds Sister Paxton fleeing through the miniature wooden model that Reed has made of his house and then pans up to catch her entering the room where he’s keeping the model.
For all that, the performances do the most to keep the movie from bogging down. Thatcher (from TV’s Yellowjackets) has the showier role as the missionary who challenges Reed on his theses about religion, but East (who played the Christian girl who seduced Steven Spielberg in The Fabelmans) is the one who emerges with the acting honors as the meeker of the two who has to fend for herself and sees a dead person come back to life. The latter bit is a hoary trope of horror films, but here it takes on a rather miraculous cast, and what makes the moment is the awestruck look on East’s face. As for Grant’s Reed, he would be a Satanic figure if he weren’t such a committed atheist. (Although why don’t the missionaries comment on his British accent?) While he fires off some juicy lines about the cruel Judeo-Christian-Muslim God, he doesn’t get all the good jokes nor does he get the last word. That sort of even-handed treatment gives the sense of fair play in Heretic, and Grant’s performance makes it go down like a warm slice of blueberry pie.
Heretic
Starring Hugh Grant, Chloe East, and Sophie Thatcher. Written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods. Rated R.
