Theological horror movies have been around for so long (with The Exorcist still casting a long shadow) that you'd think any possible twists had been exhausted, but 2024 proved to have quite a few surprises in store. With films like Immaculate, The First Omen, Late Night with the Devil, and The Devil's Bath, there turned out to be quite a bit of life left in the idea of tackling faith and religious doctrine in film, but none of them tackled it as directly as Heretic. Starting off like a tense variation on Sleuth with most of the running time devoted to three characters, it's a compelling film that rewards repeated viewings with plenty of enjoyable nuances to its performances and clever production design.

Late one rainy afternoon, Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton are bicycling around doing missionary visits for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at the behest of Elder Kennedy (Grace). When they arrive at the home of Mr. Reed (Grant), they reluctantly agree to come inside when he tells them his wife is at home making blueberry pie. However, in the house they find nothing is as it seems as their seemingly welcoming host wants to engage in an unusual form of discourse about the nature of religion posing a series of challenges for the two young women. And that's all you need to know.

The obvious main attraction here is Grant, who made his career largely with beloved romantic comedies but had no trouble going into adventurous, quirky territory like his quirky turns in several Guy Ritchie films. This is the first time his familiar persona has become full-on sinister though, and he dives into the role with great enthusiasm including some marvelous improvised flourishes like the now legendary "meow." It's no wonder his performance got some awards heat behind it, but Thatcher and East are excellent as well playing two very different extroverted versus introverted personalities whose takes on their predicament lead to a poetic and haunting resolution that leaves several avenues of interpretation open.

In keeping with some of its prestige titles like Midsommar and The Green Knight, A24 released Heretic directly as separate Blu-ray and UHD editions (the latter a site exclusive) with deluxe packaging including six collectible postcards with set photos by Kimberly French. The UHD looks exceptionally crisp, with HDR-compatible Dolby Vision bringing out a wide range of gradations in the numerous dark scenes and giving a warm burnished quality to the gold highlights. The Dolby Atmos English mix (with optional English or Spanish subtitles) isn't designed to be a powerhouse but does show off the attentive work done on the sound design, which has plenty of atmospheric activity and gradually builds in intensity as the location changes from one room to the next. An audio commentary by writer-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (Haunt) is a lot of fun as they give shout outs to the actors (including the film-literate East who turned out to be more familiar with movies like Sorcerer than they were), explain the genesis of the story as an incident when they were location scouting on an earlier project, and go through the interpolation of pop culture references they were afraid wouldn't make the cut like Monopoly and Radiohead's "Creep." Wisely, they also don't offer a definitive reading on what happens in the last ten minutes. The one video extra is a making-of featurette, "Seeing Is Believing" (15m19s), featuring production footage and interviews with the three leads, both filmmakers and producer Stacey Sher, which includes some fun soundbites like Grant's "Film nerds make very good directors."

Reviewed on February 2, 2025