‘Heretic’ Does the Impossible—Makes Hugh Grant Boring

Since he first popped and fopped into our moviegoing lives in the late ’80s, Hugh Grant has been charming, cloying, hilariously funny and sometimes menacing. He managed all four while also playfully sending himself up when he embodied an egotistical actor antagonizing a teddy bear in 2017’s Paddington 2, arguably the best film of the last decade. (True or not, it is a fun argument to make.) What he can never be accused of being is dull, even in dull movies.

Well, that streak is over.

As a housebound sadist menacing a pair of Mormon missionaries in the new horror film Heretic, Grant gives the least engaged and most profoundly joyless performance of his five-decade career. Mansplaining everything from world religions to Radiohead’s “Creep” while donning convenience store clerk wireframes and a patchwork cardigan, he’s less Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees than he is the guy in the middle seat of a Southwest flight who won’t stop talking while you’re trying to read.

Written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods—the Davenport, Iowa-based filmmakers (they own a movie theater there) who wrote the original script for 2018’s A Quiet Place—the film is structured like a Socratic seminar, as Grant tries to unravel the girls’ belief system as a prelude to their corporeal destruction. But the speechifying comes off as Bond villain monologues as written by the glibbest person you know on Facebook.

Grant’s Mr. Reed also peppers the young women with so many questions—some inappropriate, some inane—that he begins to sound like Peter Graves’ pilot talking to the boy in the cockpit in 1980’s Airplane! (One gem: “Have you ever played the Parker Brothers game Monopoly?”) The actor never finds the core behind Mr. Reed’s unconvincing surface—there is none to be found—and is forced to rely on playing off his past persona, something he has done to much greater effect in other films.

Sophie Thatcher (Yellowjackets) plays the more street-smart of the pair; Chloe East, the more naive and devotional one (she was excellent as the similarly pious love interest in Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans). Both fair a bit better that Grant, particularly in the early scenes. But when the film goes off the narrative rails—even within the generous goalposts of horror movie logic—they (and us) fail to hang on.

Heretic draws whatever vivacity it has from its craft elements. Phillip Messina, production designer for the Hunger Games movies, has built a cottage core torture house straight out of our childhood nightmares. The low light camerawork of Chung-hoon Chung (he lensed both Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy and Andy Muschietti’s It, among many others) is impressively framed and lit, especially when the action moves—as it inevitably does in movies like this—to a basement dungeon.

At that point, though, there is little of value for the camera to capture. The back-and-forth that generated early tension devolves into laughably implausible character motivation on Grant’s side and Scooby-Doo Gang fact-finding on the part of his young captives.

Beck and Woods seem to be making a point about how atheists can be as fanatical and intolerant as devotees. True enough, but taken to these extremes, their argument is akin to Hannibal Lecter eating peoples’ livers to make a point that vegetarians are the real hypocrites.

Heretic’s fatal flaw lies in its very conceit. The film seems to have forgotten that when playing cat-and-mouse games, the cat, at least, is meant to be having fun. Here no one is—not Grant and least of all, not us.