I Just Saw

“Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?”

This quote from Edgar Allan Poe opens John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980), but is arguably more applicable to Heretic, the new horror film for Halloween 2024, starring Hugh Grant as an oddball who hosts a couple of young Mormon missionaries straight out of Utah. The two girls ask for safety’s sake if there’s a woman in the house before they step inside, but crucially neglect to actually see her first…

The plot then takes a heady and iconoclastic turn into philosophical horror, with Grant as Mr Reed discoursing on religion and setting up a game whereby he challenges the girls to choose between belief and disbelief. Is he madman or prophet? A random psychopath, embittered atheist, sexual deviant, or someone who really has discovered the one, true, terrifying faith that lies behind all successive iterations, from the Torah to the Book of Mormon?

Heretic has a brilliant first act and a career highlight performance from Grant, arguably an odd choice for a film of this nature, but also an absolutely perfect one. In his specs and sweater vest, with his RP tones that play in such an English manner against the women’s US accents, he creates as original a nemesis as you’ll probably see in a horror work this year. The finer details of his acting are magnificent. Most other actors would have tried to lean into the aggressiveness and fear factor of the role, but at no point does Grant ever overstate anything or seem like he’s trying to be menacing, really, which is what makes him doubly so.

When he tells the girls that he will reveal a truth that will make them want to die, what ultimately sells the line isn’t the words but the subsequent sheepish, apologetic downturn of the mouth, an evocatively British bit of impulsive politesse. In a sense what he’s doing here is re-using the faltering awkwardness of his romantic heroes that he played in his early career, and turning it towards horror rather than comedy.

Even better, he’s ably supported by Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East as the young women. The three players in the drama are strongly characterised, or feel as though they are, in the film’s elusive, literate, suspenseful, and playful first act.

Unfortunately, its last 30 minutes or so are a lot less interesting than the intrigue of that which came before. It becomes clear at this point that the characters and situation are screenplay constructs more than anything else, and that the filmmakers are playing with questions without intending to really answer them.

Of course, it doesn’t need to answer questions that have occupied humanity since the origin of our species, but in order to be consistently great it does need to place them within a solid fictional context. I think the film is conscious on some level that it doesn’t have much of anywhere to go once the second act reaches its middle, hence why it starts firing a lot of Chekhov’s guns. This object from earlier returns, that phrase of dialogue, etcetera. This gives the screenplay unity but reduces the characters to lines on a page. Still, it’s a hell (or heaven) of a journey.

Rating: 3/4