Heretic (2024)

Plot of Heretic: Two young missionaries of the Church of the Latter Day Saints, Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton call at the house of Mr Reed, who has expressed an interest in the church. They enter, on the basis that somewhere in there his wife is preparing a pie, but it soon becomes evident that he has lied. When the girls wish to leave he says that the front door is on a timer and that it will not open till the morning. He then engages them in a sort of religious discussion postulating that Christianity is just one of a long line of religions one adapted from another. He uses modern day items to illustrate his argument. He offers the girls the opportunity of leaving but that they must choose a door out of the room, which they do, ending up in an underground chamber containing a table on which is a pie. In semi-darkness a veiled and emaciated woman enters, eats some of the pie and dies. Reed communicating by voice tube tells the girls that she is a prophet and that they will see her resurrection. There is a resurrection, but is it a trick and what else lies in wait?

Content: No sex or nudity, drinking or drug taking. Outside it is snowing. Once the girls are captive in the house Mr Reed engages them in extensive religious discussion as a prelude to inviting them to choose a door which will lead them to  the underground chamber, no matter which one they choose. The chamber is pretty dark but the prophet arrives with an oil lamp (Actually a Davy Lamp used in coal mines). The girls believe the resurrection to be a trick and there are more surprises, which I won’t reveal because of spoilers. A church elder arrives at the house looking for the girls but is fobbed off by Reed. We realise that he has already recovered their bicycles which they had chained to the gate.

A View: We are usually up for a good horror film, so saw this outing at the cinema in Madrid. Hugh Grant was terrific, Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian saying that ‘Grant’s dapper performance of evil’ was done by ‘a suave, dapper and evil Hugh Grant’. If I have reservations one is the fact that much of the film takes place in the dark, and also that film makers have a tendency to go mad with their underground facilities. How deep can you go? Well, pretty deep in the case of this film, and since the presentation is supposed to be dealing with reality, rather than magic, I found myself wondering how on earth could it all have been possible.  Even so probably a watch if you like that sort of thing.

Fun Fact: Both of the young women, although no longer Mormons, had been brought up in the Mormon faith.