With Thanksgiving not far behind in the rearview mirror, Heretic is a movie that may feel familiar to many viewers — even if you aren’t one of two young Mormon girls spreading the Word to an older atheist man who traps you in his house, subjecting you to Saw-like games. The reason for this is because Heretic is about more than religion itself, the movie focuses on the arguments in which religion is entrenched. The point of Heretic is not to question what religion is but to question how people interact with religion — specifically, the fine line between burning bridges and finding community.
Heretic is a multivalent movie, maturing throughout the film’s duration not to side with one character and their beliefs but rather to imbue each character with both respectable ideologies and critical flaws. In the beginning, Hugh Grant’s Mr. Reed is a charming, older Englishman with a healthy skepticism surrounding religion. Viewers may resonate with Reed as a mouthpiece in certain moments, like when he lambasts Mormonism’s history of encouraging men to be womanizers by seeking out harems.
This veneer quickly dissipates, however, as Reed’s wife, who’s perpetually in the other room, seems more and more of a questionably real figure. The blueberry pie he claims she’s baking turns out to be nothing more than the trick of a scented candle, and Sisters Barnes and Paxton — played by Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East, respectively — find that the front door won’t open.
Reed’s arguments questioning religion become increasingly pointed, going as far as to lay out a brief history of all major religions that outlines their suspicious similarities and compares them to the Monopoly franchise. Barnes steals the limelight from him at this point. She righteously defends her faith despite Paxton’s cautionary silence out of concern for their safety. With intellect rivaling Reed’s, Barnes nimbly dumbfounds him by exposing the house of cards his argument is built upon: yes, there are a few suspicious similarities between many major religions, but the glaring differences far outnumber the similarities.
When Reed tells the missionaries that they must exit his house through one of two doors in the back — which he marks as “BELIEF” and “DISBELIEF” — Barnes’s main character factor multiplies. Whereas Paxton urges Barnes to exit through “DISBELIEF” to satisfy Reed and earn them their lives, Barnes holds a different philosophy. Reed has already decided to either kill them or let them be, Barnes reasons, so the only salvation they can reach for at that moment is sticking true to what they believe. With that, Barnes guides the two of them down into a dungeon-like basement, to which the “BELIEF” door also happens to lead.
Earlier, Barnes pilfered a small, discreet blade from Reed’s study. Like a baton in a relay, she passes this to Paxton because Reed is too wary of Barnes — with this transfer, Paxton receives the final duration of the film’s focus.
Reed constructs a false prophet trick for the two missionaries. He forces the girls to witness a woman he claims to be the one true prophet poison herself and then come back to life. In a series of well-timed distractions and expert manipulation on Reed’s part, the dead prophet is replaced with a living woman from a stash of captive women deeper in Reed’s lair. The new, “resurrected” prophet speaks to the girls, saying, “It’s not real.”
A spat breaks out between the girls and Reed, which results in Reed slitting Barnes’s throat. Paxton, left with only herself to depend on, transforms from the airhead archetype to the competent, independent lead. That’s how, in a detective-like montage, she was able to deduce the truth behind Reed’s false prophet trick, sparked by the prophet’s warning, “It’s not real.” Reed attempted to play this off as describing the afterlife, but Paxton interpreted it as the woman reaching out to her and Barnes regarding Reed’s scheme.
Filling the action quota for the movie, Paxton locates the stash of captive women and promises to free them, but Reed finds her first. Paxton stabs him in the throat, then runs back up to the dungeon-like basement, where Reed catches up with her. Reed stabs Paxton in the stomach, and both of them lie in the basement, exchanging dialogue as Reed weakly but repeatedly tries to kill Paxton.
It’s revealed that Reed’s religion is controlled, and Paxton admits that she doesn’t care what’s true or not — to her, religion is about the feeling of human connection. As if to cement this sentiment of everlasting connection, Barnes miraculously springs up to bludgeon Reed to death before he can kill Paxton; then, finally, Barnes dies. Paxton escapes the house at last, hallucinating a butterfly on her fingers before the screen switches to black.
Earlier in the movie, Paxton claimed that, when she dies, she only wants to return as a butterfly gracing her loved one’s fingertips — just enough to let them know it’s her. The ending is ambiguous, with the butterfly opening up a multitude of interpretations. Is the butterfly Barnes reaching out to Paxton from the afterlife, letting her know that their connection persists even after death? Or is the butterfly a representation of Paxton’s own imminent death; she could either be seeing her spirit self as if in a mirror, or the hallucination itself could be a sign of the end.
The movie began as a caustic, atheist critique of religion. Then, it turned on itself, lauding the equal credibility of religion’s existence compared to its non-existence. In the end, as if exasperated, it said To hell with all of it, caring neither about reality nor unreality, instead focusing on the immediate and human benefit of religion.
It takes a masterful movie to get away with seating its audience for almost two hours, only to leave them with no answer regarding the movie’s subject — and Heretic does just that. However, even if it doesn’t make a grand statement on religion, it does say something small yet satisfactory about the nature of arguments: do not be so blinded by your position that you can’t see the person in front of you.
