In the Flesh: Heretic

“I keep these women a bit wet and a bit nippy,” says Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant), grinning with avuncular charm at Mormon missionary Sister Paxton (Chloe East) from the head of a room full of caged women, “but only for the same reason your church brings Bibles to Haiti in the wake of a hurricane. It’s easier to control people who’ve lost everything.” It’s a brutal button on a cleverly presented thesis, that all religious architecture is fraudulent, existing only to exercise power over and exploit its adherents, an endlessly metastasizing cognitive virus as predictable as a slime mold following a sugar trail. Much to its credit, Heretic isn’t interested on selling its viewers on the ultimately trite and tedious question of whether or not God is real. Instead it orients itself on why people believe, and on what forms belief can take, on cognitive dissonance and the testing and sharing of doubts among believers. An early scene in which Paxton shares a memory of watching pornography with her companion, Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher), only to awkwardly parlay the discussion into a tenuously justified reaffirmation of their shared faith, gets at something films about religious belief seldom bother to explore: doubt and the testing of disbelief is a normal, everyday occurrence.

There are no apologetics for the LDS church here, but there is a firm attempt to understand why people might belong to it and engage with it. The comfort of prayer even when you know it’s useless, the simplifying warmth of intentionally indulging in delusion, the joy of community. Religion is largely a social phenomenon. People don’t read the Bible. They don’t seriously debate theology amongst themselves. They want to be together. This kind of gentle understanding prevents the film from swerving into caricature in its approach to its missionary protagonists, keeping them sympathetic even as it lands its barbs and makes its points. We see these people doubt, we see them circumvent their own expressed beliefs; in short, we see them do everything that real religious people do when the practical considerations of their lives come into conflict with their espoused beliefs. We see them do what many of us have done. It’s a strong backdrop for a clever, good-looking film anchored by Grant’s twinkly-eyed charm and the strong performances of his much younger co-stars. 

Director Chung Chung-hoon has a keen sense for when to linger in close-up, pushing in on Grant’s lined and naturally mischievous features as he draws his guests deeper and deeper into his game. He has a natural facility for subtle humor, as in his stuffy shots of the two missionaries sitting in Grant’s living room, and Heretic largely avoids the worst pitfalls of modern color grading. It’s not vibrant, but clearly by design, and its subdued palette is still richly intelligible, shading from the warm earth tones of the living room to the raw wood austerity of the chapel to the wet gray squalor of the basement and sub-basements. It’s a smart film, vicious and humane in equal measure, and its clever visuals, fantastic cast, and underlying attentiveness to the quirks of human nature make it one of the year’s sharpest horror flicks.