'Heretic' spoilers! Hugh Grant spills on his horror villain's fears and fate
Spoiler alert! The following post discusses important plot points and the ending of “Heretic” (in theaters now), so beware if you haven’t seen it yet.
Deep thoughts and deeper cuts pepper the religion-tinged horror movie “Heretic,” which offers a different spin on the scary-movie villain and the "final girl" trope as well as an ending to ponder after the credits roll.
Written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, “Heretic” centers on a pair of young Mormon missionaries, Sisters Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Paxton (Chloe East), who knock at the door of seemingly kind English guy Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant). He invites them in to chat religion, telling them his wife is making some blueberry pie. But alas, there’s no spouse or baked goods: Reed brings them to his study to test their faith, explain the iterations of organized religions over centuries (using everything from rock bands to the history of “Monopoly”), and makes them choose between doors marked “Belief” or “Disbelief” in order to leave.
They choose “Belief,” but every door in this maze of terror leads to the same place: a basement dungeon where Reed reveals “the one true religion,” control over others. And in his case, it’s a host of women Reed keeps in cages for his nefarious theological machinations.
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Hugh Grant’s ‘Heretic’ villain gets a violent comeuppance
Grant says the most despicable aspect of Reed is “he feels absolutely nothing for those girls or for the women in the cages." He offers to show a “miracle” to the world-weary Barnes and somewhat naīve Paxton, bringing out a hooded, decrepit “prophet” to drink poison and then be resurrected. The woman gets up and explains what she saw in the afterlife. Barnes knows it’s a trick and calls Reed out on it ― and has her throat slit by him ― while Paxton figures out that another woman was swapped in after the first one died. (Also, the “resurrected” lady even cryptically says, “It’s not real.”)
Paxton finds her inner strength and fights back, gouging Reed in the neck with a letter opener so she can get away. But when she goes back to see if Barnes is OK, Reed stabs Paxton in the stomach. And for the scene in which Reed crawls to her and asks her to pray, Grant reveals he filmed two different versions.
In one, he’s the Mr. Reed of the whole film: “He was sort of thinking, ‘Isn't this fun? Look at us now! This is quite something. You are stabbed, I'm stabbed. We're gonna die, and what's gonna happen? That's fun,'” the actor says. “Then I thought it might be interesting right at the end of the film to see a completely different side of him, and that he's absolutely terrified of dying.” The final cut features the latter, “although it's quite hard to tell that he's scared," Grant says. "He's very scared. I put my head on her shoulder and I'm kind of sobbing, because all his certainty about there being no God, suddenly he's in the face of death doubting his own doubts.”
Woods figures Reed is as scared of that as everybody else. “Because really, the pursuit of finding out what the one true religion is is the pursuit of comfort when we all die, right? It's to give us medicine for that terror we have of when we die. Is there anything else, or is that it? That's a very scary idea. Reed has spent his whole life trying to basically solve that puzzle. And in his final moments, that fear coming out of him and that desperation to connect with somebody before it might all be ending, it just felt so honest to us.”
‘Heretic’ directors leave their ending up to audiences’ faith
Before Reed lands a fatal blow to Paxton, the presumed-dead Barnes gets up and whacks Reed in the side of the head with a board full of exposed nails. Barnes dies, and Paxton escapes. Outside, she sees a butterfly land on her hand ― a nod to a scene earlier in the movie when Barnes mentions she’d like to be reincarnated as a butterfly ― before it disappears. Or was it ever there?
The filmmakers crafted a finale that left much to interpretation. Did Barnes actually come back to life to save Paxton? Is the butterfly just in Paxton’s mind? Does Paxton survive? Maybe she succumbs to her wound and she sees the butterfly in the afterlife.
“We really wanted this movie, ostensibly a conversation about religion for two hours, to translate into a conversation with the audience,” Woods says. “Our hope is that people are talking about it and testing their theories.”
Beck adds that when they started screening the movie, some people loved the ending and found their own meanings while others weren’t satisfied by the ambiguity of the final moments. “It's not there to provide definitive answers,” Beck says. “It's there to provoke or remind people of the greatest questions that we have as human beings, and how we curate our existence.”