• Director: Scott Beck, Bryan Woods
• Screenwriter: Scott Beck, Bryan Woods
• Cast: Hugh Grant, Sophie Thatcher, Chloe East
• Cinematography: Chung Chung-hoon
• Editing: Justin Li
• Score: Chris Bacon
• Genre: Horror thriller
• Runtime: 111 minutes

When a pair of naive Mormon missionary girls knock on his door in a bid to convert him to their cause, Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant) invites them in under the pretence he has a wife (it’s a rule of the young women that they must have another female present in the room). He doesn’t, of course, have said spouse. The girls don’t know what they’ve got themselves into.

Come into my parlour, said the spider to the fly.

It’s a movie of two halves; and with two writers/directors, it makes you wonder if they worked on separate halves and stitched them together, Frankenstein’s monster-style. The first half, wherein the missionaries are lured into Reed’s house like lambs to the slaughter and he begins to challenge their religious beliefs is rather gripping; you could cut the tension with a breadknife. He lectures them on how there’s no one true religion and that they’re all variations of each other, but does so using pop culture metaphors (such as different editions of Monopoly) as a way of making it accessible – I never thought I’d be hearing Hugh Grant ‘sing’ a few bars of Radiohead’s ‘Creep‘ or do a woeful Jar Jar Binks impersonation, yet here we are. He then forces the pair into some kind of psychological game, marking two identical doors as ‘belief’ and ‘disbelief’ and tasking them to choose one if they want to leave. It’s ‘Saw‘ but instead of Jigsaw at the helm, it’s Grant, putting a sinister twist on his usual bumbling, English toff persona.

The latter half, once the choice of which door to walk through has been made, is weighed down by theological mumbo jumbo and drivel about miracles and resurrections. It’s not for me; I’m too scientifically minded to take in any of this hogwash, I believe in logic as opposed to a god. It would’ve been a better film had it kept up the tense atmosphere and not devolved into a holy commotion – ‘Heretic‘ is hardly manna from heaven.

My rating: 5 / 10