Heretic (2024)

 

At last a religious horror flick without a nun in it — though the female characters do occasionally refer to each other as ‘sister’.

Heretic was custom-made for Hugh Grant, and one of its pleasures is how obvious he sets about making this.

I've griped in the past about the sometimes extremely arch techniques that Hollywood currently deploys as a mechanism for preserving the flood of both liberals and conservatives towards the box office to enjoy the same movies. The resulting 'balance' often feels like a disingenuous marketing ploy. 

 

Not here though, as the battle of perspectives is handled extremely deftly, even rendering an illusion of premium depth to the religious debate providing the basic plot dynamics. Perhaps even Latter Day Saints will be able to unwind a little. In essence this screenplay is rather cleverly more about the mechanics of faith than the 'rights and wrongs' of it.

The only reason why I docked it half a star from the five was a handful of largely discountable examples of a slight waywardness in the manner that plot and character were realised, but overall, excellent. 

There's a moment when one of the 'sisters' suggests to Reed that he has started improvising, having lost track a bit of what he originally had planned, meticulously, and that turned out to be the moment that I felt that the movie might have done just that. At the very least it was I who lost track of this distinction between the underlying plan and the various plot driven contingencies we witnessed leading into the final act.