This movie pissed me off way more than it should. It feels like every time I think about this movie my opinion of it goes down just a little bit.
Where do I begin? I liked the first half! Moreso the first 30 or so minutes. That first interaction in the living room had me thinking this movie was going to do something awesome something cool something wonderful. It fully had me convinced that the villain Mr. Reed (played by Hugh Grant) was not some awful horrendous killer, and that he was going to push their faith in their religion to its limits, without imposing any sort of influence on their choices.
This idea is so heavily hinted at, that I had already started piecing together in my head all the directions this could go and how cool it would be for a movie to pull this off. There were obvious hints placed that his intentions were not in kind spirits, but they weren't so threatening that there was a sense of imminent death looming around the corner. The fact that it was taking so long for his wife to make an appearance, the mention of the metal walls immediately upon the missionaries entering the house, the amount of time it took for him to open the door. These are all things you pick up on (which of course will be revealed as important later), but think they are more strange than sinister.
Even stranger than those signals is the way that Grant's character discusses religion with the missionaries. He is obviously well studied, and even discloses to the girls that he majored in theology in search of the one true religion. I think at this point it would be obvious to anyone watching that he is not a huge fan of religions, but he still doesn't seem like he wants to harm the girls in any way.
The moment the girls started noticing the lies and it's revealed that the blueberry scent was coming from a candle is the moment I REALLY got my hopes up, thinking the plot would continue along a rigorous test of faith and that would be it.
Of course it wasn't.
In the next room after some strange explanation as to why the front door won't let the missionaries leave, they are presented with two doors which both are supposedly exits to the house! This is where the movie starts making me wish I had bought tickets to something heinously bad instead of Heretic so that I wouldn't be raging about the wasted potential.
After an inconclusive deliberation it's revealed to the girls that the doors are symbolic of belief and disbelief in religion (which was not much of a reveal to the viewer since it can be seen coming from a mile away). Although predictable, I thought "Oh, neat! He's going to push their belief to such an extreme that this becomes a non-trivial choice and they're going to strengthen their connection with their faith!" Wrong.
There is instead an extremely corny, shallow, and dry monologue from Mr. Reed that has references to Radiohead, Lana Del Rey, and Jar Jar Binks. Actually absurd to me that grown men were in a room somewhere writing this going "ooh, that's good..." The funniest part is that the references aren't the worst parts of the monologue! This is because it's filled with simple minded edgelord Slayer T-Shirt takes that any 8th grader who hates going to church has thought of. There is absolutely 0 depth to anything Mr. Reed says during this entire scene. It all amounts to "b-b-but there were other religions before this one! How could they all be true?" Not only is this about the least original take you could've put in an atheistic rampage, but it also completely undermines the reason people follow religions. When it boils down to it, it doesn't matter if the religion is true or not, what matters is that religion gives people SOMETHING to believe in and regardless of what it is, there is beauty in that.
I refuse to believe that a studied theologist could have ever come to this tired nihilistic stance. Upon writing in chalk "belief" and "disbelief" on the two doors he says something along the lines of "if you believe then God is evil because bad things happen, and if you don't believe then that is nothing and that's horrifying too." I'm 99% confident that I could open Instagram right now, go to #faith and find a comment on any given post saying this exact thing. Good one, dude, you were miserable and now you're miserable and a prick. Life sucks nothing matters we're all going to die ahhh! Must be so horribly boring to think that way.
This isn't even the worst part, because one of the girls decides "I'm going to the disbelief door because I think he wants me to" and the other girl decides "I'm going to the belief door because I think he wants me not to." So, they both go through the belief door, and surprise surprise it's not an exit but a spooky dark basement. Great, the theological thriller meant to be about questioning belief systems gave me a 4chan athiesm post and then turned into a serial killer spooky scary basement movie.
Admittedly, I DID think the scene with the prophet was pretty cool. I thought her hunched over in the corner looked creepy asf but also kinda cool. I thought her being a "prophet" and supposedly being killed and brought back to life in front of their eyes was pretty cool. Honestly, if this was the real plot of the movie and she was a prophet and some miracle had occured and went some other direction I may have excused the monologue, but the fun doesn't end there.
The "prophet" does come back to life and tells them some generic heaven information then says "it's not real" and then is ushered back to her hiding hole. Following the prophetic resurrection with the two missionaries as witnesses, there is an obnoxious sequence where one of the elders from the church comes looking for the missionaries. This interaction amounts to literally nothing and is just a waste of time and filler to act like there is any suspense or doubt as to what is going to happen. Then, Mr. Reed comes back down to the basement.
In the next 10 minutes, Mr. Reed says that the prophet was describing simulation theory, and kills sister Barnes just to take out her contraceptive from her arm and claim it was a microchip otherwise she would come back to life. Following this, sister Paxton who has never in the entire movie figured anything out on her own, suddenly unravels the entire plan!
Following the typical format of this sort she finds that he has multiple women in cages who were used as the "prophet" and he says "YOU'VE FOUND THE ONE TRUE RELIGION IT'S CONTROL I KNOW YOUR EVERY MOVE YOU CHOSE TO END UP HERE!" I don't think I have to explain what a waste of time the entire second half of this movie was to get to that awful ending.
Sister Paxton escapes miraculously through some horror movie tropes because of course she does, and the movie ends. I did not want this to be my first movie review on here. I really was just waiting for a movie to make me passionate enough to write about it, and sadly it turns out that I watched a movie that made me passionately hate it rather than passionately love it.
This review is probably pretty rough and probably reads more like a rant, but hopefully my reviews get better over time. I'm not gonna recommend for or against watching this movie because it is not spoiler free in any way, but I hope some of you got some enjoyment out of the movie. It's still not the worst movie of all time or even close to it, but that is the exact reason it frustrates me so horribly.
Love y'all,
PCx180e