When two young missionaries knock on the wrong door and end up in a seemingly charming man’s home, the horrors they face are not only physical but existential. In Heretic, directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, the stakes go beyond life and death. The film is about manipulation, belief, and the freedom of thought.
The setup for this film is simple: two young Mormon missionaries, Sister Barnes and Sister Baxton, approach the home of Mr. Reed, an eccentric man interested in learning more about the Mormon faith. But once they are inside, things take a turn for the worse. Conversations become interrogations, hospitality becomes captivity, and faith is questioned.
What makes Heretic unique and intriguing is that it places less emphasis on common religious horror themes like possessions and demons, while serving as more of a debate on faith. Mr. Reed doesn’t raise knives or crosses, but raises questions that shake the missionaries’ piety. Reed questions the contradictions in their beliefs, rewrites their readings, and exposes how faith is both beautiful and dangerous. As the sisters defend themselves, the more they start to believe how fragile their certainty really is. Mr. Reed doesn’t want the sisters to challenge their faith but to dismantle it — piece by piece. This film’s horror doesn’t come from fear of death but from the fear of doubt.
Visually, the film mirrors the unraveling of control caused by Mr. Reed. At the start of the film, the house seems bright and cozy with warm lighting. But as the night drags on and questions are thrown, the lighting grows colder and the rooms get smaller. The camera moves slower and lingers longer than it should as if waiting or afraid for a scare. But there are no jumpscares or violent outbursts that pop the tension — it keeps building, keeping the audience on the edge of their seat.
Hugh Grant’s Mr. Reed is one of those villains that terrifies you because he starts to convince you. He isn’t demonic or violent but intelligent, amusing and psychopathically calm. His power doesn’t come from violent rituals or possessions but persuasion. He traps the missionaries because he believes he is more certain, therefore convincing them that they are wrong. Watching Mr. Reed tearing apart their worldview is like a wrecking ball crumbling a building down to its foundation.
But the movie’s brilliance is how it refuses to take sides. It doesn’t mock religion nor does it celebrate secularity. Instead, it treats both sides as opposites: faith as a form of comfort, doubt as a form of freedom, but both as an extreme measure. As Mr. Reed shoots off question after question, one sister clings tighter to her belief while the other begins to question them. What started as an unified mission of conversion quickly became a search for identity.
As the film reaches a climax, faith and reason blur into something unrecognizable. To the sisters, the house that was once a trap, becomes a church of contradictions. And when the truth (or what looks like truth) finally surfaces, it’s not delivered as revelation, but as despair. There’s no grand exorcism or final escape, just the lingering question of what’s left when your certainty starts being examined.In the end, Heretic leaves you haunted not by what you saw, but by what it makes you think about. It’s a film that replaces jump scares with unease, violence with dialogue, and cheap thrills with existential dread. It understands that the human mind craves certainty but deep down, it also knows we want to be fooled. We want to believe that our beliefs are safe, our world is stable, and that the door we just knocked on isn’t the one that will change everything.
