The TIFF Film Review: “Heretic“

By Ross

There stands a house, one of many that I saw at TIFF, isolated and foreboding, sending chills down my spine and into my gut. There is a tension and tightness in these types of films and their reactive character dynamic, a framing that hasn’t always sat so well with me. Yet, over the course of ten days, Frontmezzjunkies saw ten films at the Toronto International Film Festival. And many of them scared the bejesus out of me, so just in time for Halloween, here is the one that shook me to my core, making me question my senses, knowing full well that ‘scary’ has never been my go-to.

Heretic starts with the most intriguing contemplative discussion between two young women, played impressively by Sophie Thatcher (“Yellowjackets“) and Chloe East (“The Fabelmans“). These two, dressed tight, prissy, and conservatively, talk cautiously about sex, porn, and condoms, in a way that feels progressive yet defensive, as if they know they shouldn’t, but just can’t help themselves. They also carry a desire to trust one another with thoughts that don’t exactly fit their formed personas. They walk, pushing their bikes alongside them, until it is revealed, quite abruptly, that the two are Mormon evangelists tasked with converting the curious over to their fold.

Today’s appointment is with an older reclusive man who greets them at the door with a smile and a twinkle in his eye that masks something far different than what these two know what to do with. That doorway is the threshold we must walk through in ‘A Quiet Place‘ duo Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’ feature film, “Heretic” which I saw the first weekend at the Toronto International Film Festival, and although I was thrilled to see the actor Hugh Grant (“Four Weddings and a Funeral“; “Love, Actually“) bite in so deeply to his wife’s blueberry pie filled with deception and religious contemplation, I wasn’t quite ready for the tense cat and mouse game of faith and belief that is hiding behind that twinkle and that locked door.

Utterly compelling and intriguing, Heretic is wrapped in a three-character formulation that works its sinister magic like a board game gone dark. Grant’s cerebral theologian, Mr. Reed shivers with a certain tightness and excitement that makes more and more sense the deeper we go down the stairways of belief or disbelief. The challenge is laid out before them, after an overly long, drawn out, yet intense conversation about faith and religion, that sometimes falters and slides itself out like a serpent looking for its prey to play with.

Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’s screenplay does a fairly good job keeping us tuned in to the sharpness of the horror that lies behind those locked doors, feeding us nibbles of pie and intellectual rhetoric that fire up the thoughts and fears that live inside these two women. Sparring smartly with two young Mormon evangelists, Grant doesn’t fail the formula, keeping us captive in his eager eyes. “Do you believe?” he asks them as they stare forward wondering what the hell they have walked openly into, and we join them in their tense silence.

The two actresses, and their compelling different qualities, lock us in with them and make us feel their fear-based nervousness build into something powerful and intense. Pulled along intently by cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung’s (“Last Night in Soho“) dark and sinister visuals, Heretic is imbued with a formula and creativity that works its dark magic on our senses, and as played with by Grant and his convincing villain, we hold on to the bike key tightly, hoping we get to use it one more time in our grand butterfly escape.