Heretic: Hugh Grant’s brilliance wrestles this tranquilized take on holy horror

If not original, a dissection of belief needs to be sincere and agile.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

Hugh Grant prepares to eviscerate the script.

Halloween night: the perfect setting for a horror film. Religious horror: the perfect horror sub-genre. The supernatural invading the natural, darkness swallowing the light, tension and suspense assaulting the placidity we all crave, and doubt gnawing away at faith. All these reversals of the order we try to live in are on offer in Heretic. This is a ghoulish and ghastly offering from writer/directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who are no strangers to the genre. In Heretic they bring the best that horror cinema has to offer: simplicity.

The plot and script are lean enough to effortlessly perform the twists and contortions needed to keep the viewer off-guard and on the edge of their seat. The script is tight, with some wonderful opportunities to soliloquise and dialogue that is deliciously awkward and painful. The camera work is almost cruel in its relentlessness. This is not a film of jump scares. Here the camera lingers, and lingers…and lingers. Tight close ups on frightened faces and sinister smiles. Slow pans round a room, promising a sudden shock of relief that never comes – only more anxiety.

The camera refuses to make the experience easy, but insists on letting the atmosphere and semiotics drive the audience to the point of tears. Such a focused and aggressive camera needs performers who won’t shy away but will grab it and wrestle with it! Thankfully, the performances are superb across the board. It's basically a three-hander, carried by Sophie East, Chloe Thatcher, and the indominable Hugh Grant (more about him later).

East and Thatcher play two young Mormon missionaries – Sister Paxton and Sister Barnes - who spend their days walking the streets of a small American town in the mountains. In between dispiriting attempts to communicate their faith with an apathetic and even derisive public, they wile away the hours discussing their faith, their hopes and dreams, the perception of Mormonism in the popular culture, and the marketing of ‘magnum condoms’. Sister Paxton is earnest and zealous, desperate to prove herself as a missionary by converting at least one person. Sister Barnes is a little more reserved, almost cynical. There is less fervour, a hint of weariness, even the lurking sense of doubt?

The two young ladies end an exhausting day with a visit to an isolated mountain-top cottage where they believe the seemingly kindly and bumbling English gent, Mr. Reed, is a prospective convert. Who else bumbles like Hugh Grant? It’s a joy to watch. What they hope will be a pleasant chat about their faith slowly descends into a horrifying and twisted psychological torture session, where the concepts of faith, doubt, religion, prophesy, and institutional thinking are all examined.

I dare not say much more. This is a film which hides its twists well and uses the mundanities of blueberry pie and Monopoly to chillingly hilarious effect.

However…

Having heaped praise upon praise, I must admit that I left the cinema feeling slightly disappointed. I love horror cinema. I love religion – so much so that I’ve made it my day job. I love them in combination that appears pretty frequently, from the giddy heights of The Exorcist to the drudgery that is The Exorcist: Believer. This means that most of the themes that can be explored have been explored. Originality is nearly impossible, and not really necessary – but exploring the themes with sincerity and agility would be nice. The script might be acrobatic, but the thematic exposition is about as plodding as a tranquilised elephant with a limp.

It is bad.

Again, I don’t want to give the twists and turns away, but quite quickly a dissonance between the brilliance of the dialogue and the turgidity of the theme appears, and it doesn’t…go…away! What is faith and what is doubt? Good. What is belief and what is disbelief? Good. No. Scrap that. ‘RELIGION IS ALL JUST MAN MADE!’ Okay, we could explore that. ‘NO. JESUS IS BASICALLY HORUS.’ Right, but let’s tease out the nuance. ‘NO! RELIGION IS JUST A SYSTEM OF CONTROL!’

Mr Reed suddenly morphs into the most tiresome bore. A cross between the theological illiteracy of Dawkins and the pathological obsession with power of Foucault. It is possible that this is part of the point – that this was intended to be a witty and incisive invective against institutionalism (especially institutionalised misogyny), and the ladies do land some philosophical counterpunches which expose the emptiness of Mr Reed’s rantings – but it just wasn’t done subtly or adeptly enough. What promises to be a thematic exposition of the nature of belief turns into a fairly lumbering and ponderous lecture on how belief full-stop is a ‘system of control’. We get it. We’ve been hearing this for centuries, and at a new fever pitch since the early noughties. Again…originality isn’t essential if the same old theme is explored well. I just didn’t feel it was. I felt it was a chore.

Yet (another twist coming!), Mr Reed is still compelling. However boring the thematic content, I was never bored. Hugh Grant is superlative as the sinister, fanatical, hateful, charming, charismatic, hilarious Mr Reed. He delivers lines filled with acid yet dipped in honey. He smiles that singular smile as both wolf and lamb at once. His eyes twinkle with light that is both warm and yet dead and cold. He delivers laugh out loud speeches with absolute relish. The theme might be being butchered, but when the butcher is Hugh Grant you sort of forgive it all.

I would advise you see this film. It's excellent on every technical level and an almost perfect tension builder. It's not perfect, and those who are genuinely interested in the theme are likely to roll their eyes as the early promise of interesting study devolves into something sub-Sam Harris. But ignore that and just enjoy the twists and turns. Ignore it and focus on Hugh Grant. He’s never been better.

**** Stars.

Article

Assisted dying

Culture

Politics

4 October 2024

5 min read

Assisted dying and the cult of kindness

I witnessed an assisted death. We need to be honest in the debate about it.

Matthew Hall

Matthew is an author and screenwriter.

A tableau shows minature figures of two people, one sitting on a life size syringe and the other stands

Etactics Inc on Unsplash.

The Assisted Dying Bill is likely to be passed into law this autumn, the government having promised to ‘rush it through’. The debate will invariably be conducted in a fog of euphemistic language in which ‘compassion’ and ‘dignity’ will feature heavily on both sides, while the main point is likely to be missed: the legalisation of euthanasia or AD, marks a tectonic shift from a Christian to a post-Christian society and should be a wake-up moment for dozing Christians.

I was recently present when my aunt, an artist who had become a Canadian citizen, died by euthanasia in her own home while in the very early stages of motor neurone disease. She was 72, divorced, living independently, fully mobile (although she had lost the use of one arm) and was laughing and joking up to the moments before the doctor (or ‘The Killer’ as her son called him) injected the first dose of the lethal cocktail. It happened at 7pm on a Tuesday evening. She had made the phone call requesting her death at 3pm the previous Sunday – yes, a Sunday. Service of a kind our NHS can only dream of.

As a reluctant witness to what I consider a murder-suicide, I was nevertheless beguiled by the relatively clean ending (although there was some disturbing gurgling that apparently occurs as a result of the lungs filling with fluid) to a life that was about to become very difficult. Her two older siblings, including my mother, are each currently several years into slow deaths from combined Parkinson’s and dementia.

I am an almost daily visitor and a secondary carer to my mother, and while she is mute, benign and seemingly contented, the toll on my stepfather and on me is enormous. I often pray for it all to be over – it’s an endless grind and her former self would be utterly horrified to see herself this way! – and yet, as a Christian, I have to see purpose in it. One thing it certainly does do, is force carers to be selfless and compassionate in the strict sense of the word, which is ‘to suffer with’.

Her decision to die was the ultimate consumer choice – she availed herself of a service that promised to free her from her ailing body as quickly and comfortably as possible.

Get updates

My aunt didn’t want the trial of becoming ill and dependent, and the Canadian government gave her an opt-out which she grabbed the instant she received her diagnosis. Confirmation by two doctors that she was terminally ill and of sound mind – almost a trifling formality – got her immediate approval. She was, to use her kind of language, ‘out of here’ a mere three months later.

How could she have been so cavalier and determined to die, despite the protests of her son, nephew and granddaughters? She was, in hindsight, a perfectly minted product of the 1960s who believed above all in doing her own thing - whatever felt right. Such notions were anathema to her Christian parents and their dutiful wartime generation but are now the norm.

Like many who came of age to the sound of the Beatles, she toured the spiritual supermarket and picked out the nice bits from Christian, pagan and Eastern religions – predominantly those that allow you to think that life is about ‘being in tune’ or feeling good about yourself. This did most definitely not include becoming immobile and having strangers change her nappy. She believed in an afterlife, ‘love’, aliens and reincarnation but definitely not in judgement or consequences for her suicide.

Her decision to die was the ultimate consumer choice – she availed herself of a service that promised to free her from her ailing body as quickly and comfortably as possible, with the added bonus of leaving her assets to her family.

The truth, as the Canadian experience demonstrates, is that AD is not a slippery slope but a cliff edge.

Polls in Canada and the UK show that the vast majority would consider this a win all round. According to Opinium, 75 per cent of British adults support AD. In political terms this a ‘bridge issue’ almost without comparison, uniting 78 per cent of Conservatives with 77 per cent of Labour supporters, yet no issue should more starkly dramatise the unbridgeable chasm between Christian and secular world views.

The sharpness of this divide has, however, been successfully obscured by the insidious (and to my mind, diabolical) Cult of Kindness that has inveigled itself into both secular and Christian space. Imitating Christian virtues, it subverts them by subtly perverting language - by using ‘compassion’ when what is meant is ‘convenience’, for example – and by making ‘happiness’ rather than self-sacrifice the highest good. This leads both sides into dishonesty and self-delusion.

The biggest pro-AD lie is that it is merely an escape route for the tiny few facing the most intolerable suffering with no additional consequences. The truth, as the Canadian experience demonstrates, is that AD is not a slippery slope but a cliff edge. It is now the fifth most common cause of death and climbing by 30 per cent each year. Every seriously ill Canadian now feels some pressure to address the option. Cases of people choosing AD out of despair, depression or at the suggestion of a lazy or uncaring State official are already numerous. Those who have signed an advance consent waiver setting a date for their euthanasia in the event of their mentally incapacity, are now being terminated. In some cases, the demented refuse to cooperate and are euthanised under forced sedation. The State is already saving money and families are saving their inheritances. Life itself has been downgraded.

The Christian side indulges in even bigger untruths. Windy episcopal speeches about advances in palliative care avoid the hard fact that denying AD involves many suffering prolonged and painful deaths while family finances are destroyed and carers worn down to a husk. The pill can’t be sugared: thou shalt not kill is absolute, not an invitation for an ethical discussion. The point is so fundamental that to avoid it and be drawn into discussing the minutiae of legislation is a betrayal of the faith.

Christians won’t save the secular world from AD and its consequences, but the current debate is an opportunity for honesty and for Christians to save themselves from the delusion that the true virtue of compassion can be inverted to justify killing.

The Christian religion began with an agonising death of a kind which its scriptures exhorts its followers not to fear. It’s a tough message: God doesn’t promise the comfort we would like in this life. We do have the means and the duty to alleviate much suffering, but death as a consumer choice is simply off the table.