The first time I saw the trailer for Heretic, I genuinely laughed. Hugh Grant? Playing a villain? Come on. The man built a career on stammering through romantic confessions in country manors. He's basically a human golden retriever in a waistcoat.
Then I watched the actual film, and my stomach dropped.
Grant plays a man who traps two Mormon missionaries in his house and forces them to play a theological game with constantly shifting rules. That's the setup. Sounds gimmicky. It isn't. By the twenty-minute mark, I was sitting forward in my seat with my jaw doing something embarrassing, and I wasn't sure I wanted to keep watching.
Here's the thing about Grant in this movie: he never once asks for your sympathy, but somehow you've already given it. When his character — he never gets a name, which is a choice — starts unraveling mid-conversation, there's this flicker of genuine hurt behind his eyes. The same eyes that once gazed lovingly at Julia Roberts now look like a man who's been alone in a beautiful house for so long he's forgotten what that means.
I kept thinking about my own grandfather during the middle act. He was a church deacon for forty years, and the one thing I remember about his faith wasn't certainty — it was doubt. He'd sit in the kitchen after Sunday service, stirring his coffee, and ask questions that made the pastor nervous. "But what if the book is wrong?" he'd say, like it was nothing. Watching Grant's character circle the same question, terrified of the answer, I got why my grandfather asked it.
The film isn't subtle. A24 horror rarely is. But it earns its heaviness. When the missionaries push back — and they do, brilliantly — the dialogue snaps with actual intellectual tension. These aren't horror-movie victims waiting to die. They're people with arguments, and watching Grant's carefully constructed power imbalance wobble is the kind of suspense that gets under your skin and stays there.
Critics comparing this to a "cat-and-mouse game" aren't wrong, but they're underselling it. It's more like watching someone build a house of cards in an earthquake zone and realizing the earthquake is coming from inside the builder.
At the box office, Heretic is holding its own against family Christmas movies, which tells you something. People want to be scared and challenged at the same time. We want horror that respects us enough to make us think.
Should you see it? Only if you can handle Hugh Grant being cruel, fragile, and magnetic all at once. If you've ever loved him — and let's be honest, most of us have at some point — there's a small grief to watching him disappear into this role. Like watching a friend's sweet older brother come home from war and not being the same.
That unsettled feeling is exactly the point.
