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

Character

Culture

Music

21 March 2025

4 min read

Lady Gaga’s battle for authenticity

A new album, and interviews, reveal her progress.

Jamie Mulvaney

Jamie is Vicar of St Michael's Chester Square, London.

A black and white photo of a woman about to open her mouth to sing.

Ladygaga.com.

'Bridled' isn't the first word that comes to mind about Lady Gaga. She has never struck me as being someone restrained and confined. But in a wide-ranging interview in the New York Times, she recently spoke about how the music industry 'bridles' women in music: "they talk to you a lot about your look and what the aesthetic is for the album and the “brand” of music. That started to affect how I made music.”

Whether it's others' beliefs that her more adventurous personas were the real her, or that the 'normcore' (as she puts it) of acting in A Star is Born was a sellout, she is keen to own for herself the definition of authenticity. And, two decades on, she is determined finally to match her relentless authenticity with authority. In interviews with both the New York Times and the Times of London, she has described herself as 'the boss’.

Emerging from several significant personal battles, not least the price of fame itself, Gaga is well-placed to be an authority on authority and authenticity. The jazz musician Miles David said, “Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.” By returning to her pop roots in her new album Mayhem, she is eschewing the fear of what others might think. Gaga reflects that however romanticised the tortured creative can be, it is unhealthy, and she didn't enjoy this past self when making music, contrasted with the joy of making music from a more contented place now.

When fame is so caught up with artistry (her first album in 2008 was The Fame, reissued a year later as The Fame Monster), she is communicating a sense of peace at where she has arrived in her career. Brittany Spanos reviewed her new album in Rolling Stone by saying “Gaga feels like her most authentic self from start to finish on this album: There’s no characters, concepts, or aesthetic impulses overshadowing the songs,”. This chimes with what Gaga said in her interview in the New York Times about how her work had previously taken over her: “I was falling so deeply into the fantasy of my artwork and my stage persona that I lost touch. I changed my name and refused to live outside my art, but gravity brought me home.” She may be iconic but she is not her own iconoclast: she is comfortable with myriad expressions without being defined by them.

For someone bothered about authenticity, it was an authentic friendship that inspired her to have hope to emerge more fully from her battles.

Now, the 'Perfect Celebrity' as one of the tracks on her album is called, she invites us to think about our relationship with those in fame, but also the battle for authenticity as one who is famous: “The way that we feel about celebrities, whether good or bad, is just part of the entertainment now. So you need to acknowledge that and then also acknowledge that there are now two selves. The real you, in private, and the one you project to the world. And this is something a lot of people face nowadays — which part of myself should I value more?” Gaga recognises the necessity of the platform and image for her work, but “It feels further away from who I am.”

This disconnect between the authentic self and the one portrayed is one we all face - Gaga says: “There is just more of a stage for everybody now. Everyone has the opportunity to have fame." Is it possible for people growing up today to discover who they are, when a version of fame is enmeshed with themselves?

For Lady Gaga, Jonathan Dean writes that being able to experience 'realness' saved her life. “I mean my fiancé, his mother, my family. Friendships — the real ones. Going to the store, making dinner. That is what made my whole life more rich.” She pauses. “I wouldn’t say fame made my life more full.”’

In particular, she credits her now-fiancé with her general wellbeing. If you listen to The Interview podcast from the New York Times, the moment she breaks down in tears is when she is asked how she knew that Michael was genuine. She said it was because he wanted to be her friend. For someone bothered about authenticity, it was an authentic friendship that inspired her to have hope to emerge more fully from her battles.

Being saved by fullness of life through friendship is something that Jesus spoke about. He chimes with Gaga's reflections on an industry that sought to take so much from her, when he says: "The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”

Lady Gaga's experience will be more extreme than most of us will endure, but we all have those places where things are taken from us and given to us, destructive and creative. It is noteworthy that her sense of own human flourishing, and being her 'authentic' self has come through relationship. And that's surely something to sing about.

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