Monday, November 04, 2024

Heretic Believes In Peace, Bitch


Is it enough for a movie to simply ask interesting questions in an entertaining manner? Not when they're as offensively and -- even worse, rotely -- answered as they are in Heretic, the religious thriller out this weekend from the screenwriters behind A Quiet Place. Really "the screenwriters behind A Quiet Place" should have been my first warning that this movie was going to be at its heart conservative gibberish, seeing as how that earlier film was at its heart a family-values tradwife fantasia. And really I don't know why I expected anything different going off Heretic's trailers which very clearly lay out that this movie was going to be anti-atheism. 

I suppose I was hoping it would have more up its sleeve? That perhaps it would find more complicated ground to land upon than "The atheist is a maniac and these religious girls are goodness personified." The sad thing is is that all of the actors are terrific, including Hugh Grant as the villain who calls into question all aspects of organized religion. The film's at its best in its first two-thirds when he is accosting Sophie Thatcher's "Sister Barnes" and Chloe East's "Sister Paxton," two Mormons who make the mistake of stumbling through his door one stormy afternoon, with his ideas. It does, as I said up top, at least ask the questions, and put some uncomfortable truths about religion out there for mass public consumption.

But it is quite honestly irresponsible in the year of nobody's lord 2024 to land on the laziest of imaginable conclusions that Heretic lands on, equating people who don't believe in your harmful fucking fairy tales with sicko freaks. 

I've taken a couple of movies in recent years to task for borrowing liberally from Pascal Laugier's 2008 masterpiece Martyrs without really grappling with what Martyrs was getting at -- Barbarian most recently, which turned the pointed pain and suffering at the heart of Laugier's angry film into a yippee fun rollercoaster ride. But Heretic borrows pretty liberally from Martyrs while outrageously flipping that movie's entire point around -- if Martyrs was about the terrifying danger of religious zealotry then Heretic is about the terrifying dangers of, uhhh, disbelief and doubt. What the fuck is this, the Inquisition? 

Really, honestly, though -- is there anything lazier than villainizing disbelievers at this point in time? It's difficult to get into details since it's the last act where Heretic really shows its cards and stops having interesting thoughts about doubt, just grabbing firmly onto the easiest of answers, obliterating any goodwill it'd built up before then. Its skillful performances and manipulating of tension just blaze straight into the same old bullshit in defense of the status quo. So there's only so much credit I can give a movie for being "brave" talking about things other movies refuse to talk about when every conclusion it comes to is this craven. Heretic wears a loose skin-suit of edgy and thoughtful only to slip into something more comfortable -- conventional thinking. This is a horror movie that will make all the wrong people feel right.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

There is--and forever will be--only one great Heretic film. That, of course, is John Boorman's jaw-droppingly unhinged fever dream film of the same name!

Anonymous said...

How are you even qualified to be a movie critic? Atheist troll

Anonymous said...

You must feel so special being one of the only critics that didn’t like this movie. Typical anti religious B.S.

ferretrick said...

#triggered

Anonymous said...

Patriarchy is the movie villain

Anonymous said...

quite the reach, even looking thru a white-washed historical lens, to posit god-loving folk as the calm reasonable ones