Two knocks on the wrong door. Heretic, the 2024 A24 thriller from Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, sends Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton, two young missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to the home of a Mr. Reed, who has expressed interest in their faith. He offers them blueberry pie and conversation. The conversation is the trap, and the front door has already locked behind them.
Audiences made it one of the year’s most discussed horror releases, and the reaction sorts cleanly. Nearly everyone praises the first hour as a masterclass in escalating menace built entirely from dialogue, and nearly everyone agrees Grant is the reason it works. Where consensus frays is the back half, when the film must convert its theological cat-and-mouse into physical horror. Some find the payoff clever and appropriately nasty. A large contingent finds it a retreat into corridors and conventions the opening had promised to transcend.
Hugh Grant Weaponizes the Charm
Casting is the film’s masterstroke, and viewers know it. Grant spent thirty years as cinema’s favorite stammering romantic before pivoting to character work, and Heretic deploys every ounce of that accumulated goodwill as camouflage. His Mr. Reed twinkles, self-deprecates, and apologizes his way through increasingly alarming territory, quoting scripture alongside board games and pop songs in a genial lecture on the history of belief. The horror builds through nothing but conversation for long stretches, and audiences describe realizing they’d been smiling at him thirty seconds too long. It’s widely called one of the best performances of his career and one of the great modern horror villains.
Crucially, the missionaries aren’t lambs. Sophie Thatcher plays Sister Barnes with a flintiness that suggests doubt worn like armor, while Chloe East’s Sister Paxton hides sharper instincts under eagerness, and the film lets both push back with real theological footing. Their debates with Reed about faith, iteration, and control have actual intellectual content, rare for the genre, and the film respects belief enough to make its defenders competent. Viewers of many backgrounds, including former and practicing members of the church, have praised how specifically and fairly the missionaries are drawn.
Beck and Woods stage all of it in a house that becomes a puzzle box, all wood paneling, candlelight, and doors that open onto worse choices. Tension mechanics from their earlier writing work get repurposed for talk instead of silence, with the camera slowly closing distances as exits disappear. The blueberry pie, the candle, the two doors labeled belief and disbelief, the film builds its imagery like an argument, and the first hour’s ratchet is as controlled as anything in recent horror.
When the Lecture Ends and the Basement Begins
Almost every criticism of Heretic points at the same hinge. The film eventually has to show its cards, moving from rhetorical menace into literal peril, and the descent into the house’s lower levels trades a unique film for a familiar one. Viewers describe the third act as a standard-issue escape scenario wearing the first act’s clothes, with reveals that answer questions less interesting than the ones the dialogue had raised. The ideas don’t vanish, and a late twist keeps the theme in play, but the electricity measurably drops, and even the film’s admirers tend to concede the ending lands softer than the setup deserved.
A related complaint targets the argument itself. Reed’s grand thesis about religion, once fully stated, strikes some viewers as a freshman dorm monologue delivered with sinister confidence, and the film’s willingness to let him dominate raises the question of whether it’s interrogating his worldview or just admiring its own script. Defenders counter that his shallowness is the point, that the film is about control dressed as inquiry. The debate mirrors the one inside the movie, which is either elegant or convenient depending on your seat.
Practical gripes round it out. Certain character decisions exist because the plot needs them, one late-film element strains plausibility hard, and viewers hunting jump scares will find almost none. This is horror as pressure, not release.
A Horror Film That Takes Belief Seriously
What distinguishes Heretic in a crowded genre is that its scares grow from its subject rather than around it. The film is about epistemology, how people decide what’s true, what doubt costs, and who benefits from controlling the answer, and it embodies that in a predator whose weapon is rhetoric. That it extends genuine respect to its religious protagonists while platforming their tormentor’s case makes it unusually balanced territory for horror, and it’s why the film generated so much post-viewing conversation among believers and skeptics alike. Few scary movies send audiences out arguing about faith. This one does it by design.
Should You Watch Heretic?
Watch it for Grant, full stop, and stay for a first hour that ranks with the best horror setups of the decade. It’s also one of the few genre films that gives religious characters intelligence and dignity, which makes the menace mean something.
Skip it if you need horror to pay off its dread with equal force, or if two hours of mostly conversation sounds like a sermon regardless of who’s delivering it. The back half will decide your final opinion, and it has disappointed sharper viewers than you.
The Verdict on Heretic
Heretic is two-thirds of a great film attached to an ending that settles for good, and the math still comes out favorable. Grant gives a career-highlight performance as a monster made of politeness, Thatcher and East refuse to play victims, and the script trusts an audience to find ideas frightening. That the finale retreats toward convention is real and costly. What remains is the rare horror film about faith that respects both its believers and its audience, and one door-knock scene away from being a classic.