Heretic

One of the old tricks in the book is to cast 'against type', i.e. to take an actor we are used to seeing in a specific genre and do something completely different with their role. This creates awareness first and foremost, and can also lead to renewed creative energy.

In relation to Hugh Grant as the enigmatic, eccentric and ferocious religious philosopher in A24's Heretic, it works like a charm. Because that's really all you need to know about the now legendary production company's latest triumph - Grant is as far from the charmer of the straight romantic comedy as you can get and is fearsome, calculated and ravingly insane, and that's the film's big draw. The rest is pretty much just okay.

Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton (played by Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East respectively) are missionaries for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (also known as the Mormon Church) and stumble upon Mr Reed's (Grant) house by chance, and as he invites them in for a piece of blueberry pie and an ice cold Coke, they feel the unease growing within minutes. Suddenly, however, they are in his web and it seems he has been waiting quite patiently for this moment, a moment when he will confront them with his personal theories on the role of religion in modern society, and do so in a rather creepy way too.

What follows is an hour and a half in an escalating thriller setting where Reed's strange house, which has been redesigned for this very purpose, acts as a constantly surprising setting, and where Reed himself plays intellectual and philosophical games with the two terrified young women. East and Grant in particular deliver the goods here, but this is Grant's film after all, and everything about him, from slightly fogged glasses to every line, is eerily carefully executed. Heretic doesn't deserve an Oscar, but Grant's performance is on that level - comprehensive, sophisticated and utterly believable despite the eccentricity and insanity.

The funny thing is, and it can be hard to tell apart, his delivery of the content is sometimes better than the content itself. Yes, because after a series of eerily intense set-up scenes in the first half of the film, where Grant's philosophical exposition of religions and pointing out their contradictory basis for existence, Heretic really loses its own thread, and instead of pushing the characters forward in a way that maintains and emphasises that intensity, it all becomes one big analogy.

And it's not a subtle analogy either. Reed's character oscillates wildly from calculated to erratic, but not in any fascinating way. Rather, after about an hour, the viewer is left with a burning wish that the film would organise itself so that Grant could walk one of the two planks completely. The film doesn't continue the intellectual 'cat and mouse', nor does Reed go so far over the top that Grant can move even more. Instead, the film becomes very keen for Reed to spend his scenes emphasising analogies, explaining his motives and winning a philosophical argument with his victims, and it's not quite as interesting to watch as the film itself seems to think. Ultimately, the film lacks some of the suspense that is established and used as a device in the first half.

This is not to say that Heretic is badly put together, not at all. The colour grading, editing, music and overall construction is incredibly well done. Thatcher delivers by far the least convincing performance, but as a film that only has three actual roles, it's well acted, no doubt about it. You may well enjoy Heretic, and critics around the world seem to be more enthusiastic. I myself found Grant's performance fantastic, but that the rest of the film struggled to complete its frame.