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.

Review

Care

Community

Culture

Film & TV

25 March 2025

5 min read

Amandaland's portrayal of falling social standing is spot on

What happens when motherhood is no longer rich, powerful, and terrifying.

Beatrice Scudeler

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here.

On the sidelines of a pitch a well-dressed mum hands a coat to a sceptical looking mum beside her.

Nobody likes mums. Not really. We talk about our kids all the time, we’re bossy, we’re interfering, we’re no fun. The stereotypes abound. Not even mums like other mums. We should help each other, but we often end up mercilessly judging each other instead. If you work, you’re a cruel, neglectful mother; if you’re a stay-at-home mum, you’re lazy, weak, and probably boring.

Even worse than being disliked, though, is not being taken seriously. I thought motherhood would bestow a certain level of respect, a kind of admission, from society at large, that if you can keep a human being alive – let alone several – you must be somewhat competent at least. I can now see that’s only the case in older motherhood, once your children are grown up and you can prove to the world that you did, in fact, do a good job of raising them. Before then, while your kids are still loud toddlers or moody teenagers, being a mother is a decidedly low-status affair.

That’s exactly what Amandaland, the new Motherland spin-off, gets right. In Motherland, the original show, the character of Amanda is a confident, terrifying alpha mum, a modern anti-heroine and a foil to the frazzled, overwhelmed protagonist Julia. As a stay-at-home mum, Amanda holds on to her high social status by a combination of displaying her husband’s wealth and a careful strategy of putting other mothers down at every possible occasion.

By the end of Motherland, however, Amanda is lost: she opens and very quickly closes a lifestyle shop, she’s about to lose her house in the divorce, and her ex-husband is about to remarry. She’s not quite so terrifying anymore; she’s more human, more fragile. Her insecurities begin to show.

It’s only in Amandaland, however, that her alpha-mum persona fully breaks down. She’s had to downsize and – gasp – move from Acton to a less affluent part of London; her ex-husband is refusing to pay for their kids’ private school or for her car; she has no career and no prospects. While materially still more privileged than many, in the eyes of society she’s lost any claim to admiration.

As she meets a host of mums and dads from her kids’ new school after her move, it’s obvious that Amanda is trying to conceal this drastic change. She refers to all the furniture which she’s hording from her old, much bigger house – in her mother’s garage – as ‘curated items from my style archive’. When her mother nudges her to get rid of said ‘curated items’ in the school’s car boot sale, she deflects by declaring, in a suitably dramatic way, ‘I’m so ready to streamline all these investment pieces’. In the next episode she starts showing off, at her kids’ football practice, that ‘this big-shot interiors firm just begged me for a meet at their flagship store’. What she means is that she’s got a job interview at a kitchen and bathroom showroom. Which job she does get, by the way, and proceeds to refer to it for the rest of the show as her ‘collab’.

I said that nobody likes mums. I should have said, more accurately, that most people don’t find caregivers interesting.

There’s a reason Amanda speaks in cringeworthy euphemisms half of the time, and it’s not because she delights in being irritating. It’s because she’s feeling the full force of her fall in social status. We can judge her for being shallow enough to care about wealth and appearance so much. But it’s impossible for me not to feel an enormous amount of sympathy for her. I know what it’s like to see someone’s gaze at a social event drift away as you mention that you’re a stay-at-home mum. I know the agonizingly overnice look that often meets you when you say you’ve been trying to get back to work after having kids.

And to be clear, I’ve been referring to ‘mothers’ throughout, but consciously being perceived as low status is an experience common to all primary caregivers. In Motherland, Kevin, the stay-at-home dad of the group, was often mocked and dismissed as insignificant for looking after his two daughters full time. I said that nobody likes mums. I should have said, more accurately, that most people don’t find caregivers interesting.

There are two ways to respond to the plain fact that caregiving is seen as low status and low value, and Amanda learns both over the course of the show. The first is to realise we have an innate value that cannot be determined by social approval. We must become comfortable with being sneered at; there’s no way around it. Without spoiling what happens in later episodes, Amanda does grow in virtue by valuing status less and less, eventually rejecting the opportunity to return to wealth and high status for the sake of her family and her own integrity.

The second way is to find fellowship. The friendships which Amanda forms, especially with the wonderful Anne, also an original Motherland character, are what save her from herself in the end. Anne and the other parents show her that they, at least, don’t care that she’s no longer rich, powerful, and terrifying. They chip away at her armour until she realises that she doesn’t need to be adored in order to be loved.

We cannot control how people perceive us, but we can control how we respond. At the beginning of the show, Amanda’s response to the challenges of motherhood was to sink into self-absorption. In the end, she’s redeemed by the kindness of her friends. Motherhood will, perhaps, always be a thankless, low status job. But it’s also, and will always be, an irreplaceable one.

Celebrate our 2nd birthday!

Since March 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,000 articles. All for free. This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin

Editor-in-Chief

Give now