Heretic: Hugh Grant goes full macabre villain – and is a wicked delight

Grant has a whale of a time as a man who traps two missionaries in his house, but this religious horror turns into Saw without the gore

3/5
Hugh Grant’s Villain Era has thus far lacked a horror vehicle: but no more. It’s a long time since he’s stuttered or blushed as the leading man we once knew. Lately, in the likes of Paddington 2 and Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves, Grant has pivoted into sly roguery. In Heretic, he now has a fully macabre role as “Mr Reed”, a theologian of sorts, or the amateur religious studies teacher of your nightmares. 
He’s a man of no fixed faith, whose old, dark house boasts a lavish dungeon, and everything in the library from the Quran to the Hebrew Bible. Grant, easily the best reason to see it, has a whale of a time when he’s inflicting his brand of infidel torment on two trapped house guests. For an hour, so do we.
It’s on Reed’s door in small-town Colorado that a pair of Mormon missionaries (Sophie Thatcher, Chloe East) fatefully knock one day. Despite the forbidding abode, he’s all smiles and garrulous welcome, inviting them in to meet his wife, who he claims is baking a well-timed, delicious-smelling blueberry pie. We see no evidence of either wife or pie.
Instead, the front door clicks shut on a timed deadbolt, and these young women, without initially realising, are his captives. Until the penny drops, they make polite chat, answering his grimace-packed probing about the eccentricities of Mormonism. Yes, polygamy was de rigueur until 1890, giving Joseph Smith dozens of wives to choose from. True, the major faiths have so many core similarities as to render them essentially cover versions of one another. The writer-directors, Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, attack these ideas with debating-club glee.
Grant, in a stuffy plaid cardigan and NHS-style specs, certainly gives this rhetorical hokum the hard sell. He’s wickedly enjoyable when we’re trying to guess what he’s about. Alas, the backend of the film is a limp set of answers, a Pandora’s Box of unpersuasive twists. Nothing, once the heroines have been forced to descend into the dank bowels of the mansion, is quite as effective as the point-scoring lectures they’ve already endured.
It becomes Saw without the gore – a “gotcha” shocker without enough shocks. The women get intellectual retorts, and succeed in decrypting the film’s enigmas before we do, but the game’s already up.
Would-be diabolical as they are, the escape room riddles Reed is posing feel like rigged opportunities for the script to show off his victims’ IQs. Arrogance may be the Achilles’ heel of all Grant’s baddies, including this one, but a tip-toeing aversion to risk makes Heretic end with a whimper.
15 cert, 111 min. In cinemas from November 1