The One True Religion is Survival: The Quiet Hope of ‘Heretic’
I don’t remember exactly how old I am in this moment, but I’m definitely younger than 10. I’m attending Vacation Bible School, a weeklong summer day camp that unfolds in various iterations in churches all over the country. I’m constantly sweaty from running around and playing, but I don’t care.
It’s the 90s, I’m excited to be seeing my friends, doing crafts, and learning songs. I do not know that a terrifying trap is about to be sprung. I could not have known, when my parents dropped me off at the church that day, that one of the “teachers” of this bible school would tell me that I was going to Hell.
It’s not my fault, she tells me, tells the whole room, a room full of carefree kids just gluing popsicle sticks and paper plates together. It’s just the way it works. If you are not baptized, and therefore saved by the blood of Christ, you will not get into Heaven. And since this is a Southern Baptist church, that means there’s only one place for you to go.
Because I’m not baptized (Baptists don’t do it at birth like Catholics), I am suddenly terrified by this revelation, and even more terrified when another teacher, my own aunt, seems to back it up. I go home, frantic, and tell my younger cousin what I’ve learned. Because he needs to know. He’s not baptized either.
My cousin’s father, my uncle, is furious at this, and threatens to keep my cousins away from me if the behavior continues. My parents and grandparents, naturally concerned, assure me that I am not going to Hell, and that I don’t need to preach to other kids that they’ll go to Hell too if not for a mystical dunk in a tub of water.
This is confusing. After all, they’re the ones who drove me to church in the first place.
Heretic, the latest film from Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, is tailor-made to dredge up these kinds of memories, good and bad, no matter your journey through faith. The story of two Mormon missionaries—the more worldly Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and the innocent Sister Paxton (Chloe East)—who encounter the reclusive and sinister Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant) while trying to spread their church’s message, it’s a film built around questions of faith, of belief, of conviction. It touches on many of the central points of every religious debate you’ve ever heard in church, in high school, in college. It’s meant to make you uncomfortable, put you off balance, and remind you of your own uncertainty.
It’s also, crucially, a film about a very particular kind of hope.
When we meet Paxton and Barnes, Paxton is talking on and on about her beliefs, about the ways in which she’s been shown the truth of the world through her LDS faith. She asks Barnes, “How has God shown you that the church is true?”, as much to hear her spiritual sister’s answer as to reassure herself. Paxton, you see, is a missionary who has yet to convert anyone, while Barnes has converted more than half a dozen people. She needs a win, a chance to underline her own convictions.
When the girls meet Mr. Reed, who assures them his wife is home and thus frees them to enter his charming little house on a quiet street, Paxton is convinced she can make this conversion work. Reed is warm, receptive, enthusiastic, and surprisingly well-versed in spiritual knowledge and history. He’s even offering them blueberry pie. It is, situationally at least, everything Paxton has been promised about her mission journey. It’s yet another way she’s been shown by the world around her that her church, her faith, is “true.”
Watching her, I remember how quickly and thoroughly I was convinced that I was going to Hell, that the truth had been shown to me.
But Mr. Reed has other plans, and soon what’s true for Paxton and Barnes will be something altogether different from the faith that brought them to this man’s door.
I’m almost out of high school, in a church youth group (at a different church). I’m mostly there because I’m dating one of the girls who’s also in the youth group, but I’m trying my best to get into this whole Jesus thing, to really feel it like my friends do. They’re nice, welcoming, and kind, and it makes me want to be like them.
What really makes me want to be like them, though, is the youth pastor. He’s funny, erudite, unafraid to mix pop culture and religion together, unafraid to admit that the world is more complicated than a set of dogmatic rules for living would have you believe. He talks to me about guitar chords and Stephen King books. He seems to understand.
And to prove that he understands, he tells us, his youth group, about a certain truth he’s stumbled upon in his own personal faith. He believes that the love of Jesus Christ is so all-consuming, so bright and beautiful, that everyone will eventually be saved. Hell will open up and everyone will be freed, regardless of the lives they led or the sins they committed. He believes God loves us too much to let us suffer in eternity.
It makes sense to me. It doesn’t make sense to the parents of the other kids, who drive this youth pastor out of the church. The girl and I break up. I stop going to church.
Though the door is locked and the blueberry pie turns out to be a clever deception by way of scented candle, Mr. Reed assures Paxton and Barnes that he does not intend to hurt them. In fact, they can leave whenever they like. What he does wish to show them, though, if they choose to stay, is proof that he has found the “one true religion.” He’s a missionary too, a preacher, an evangelist for a very different breed of faith, if only they’ll listen. If only they’ll see.
In a long, dramatic pitch punctuated by peculiar touches like timed lights that keep going off and a water feature that keeps thumping its bamboo spout like a metronome, Reed tells the young women that what they’ve experienced all their lives is merely another “iteration” in a long, long line of the same old thing. All faiths, throughout all time, he tells them, are simply baking up new recipes composed of the same ingredients. They’re variations on Monopoly, they’re songs that sound alike. They’re hollow approximations of religion, not real belief systems worth investing in.
In these moments, as Mr. Reed makes his pitch through Grant’s charming, patient, beautifully orchestrated performance, I’m reminded of the person I was after that youth pastor walked out of my life, a person composed not of curiosity but of cynicism. I remember the conversations I had in my college years, conversations with fellow nonbelievers about how shallow and silly and manipulative it all was. In these moments, Mr. Reed is that 20-year-old who took one philosophy course and decided he could pick apart the whole Bible at Thanksgiving. He’s the stoner who’s seen through the smokescreens of the world, man. He’s the academic who’s chiding you for the nonsense getting in the way of the real truth.
He is also, quite clearly, putting on a show. Everything about what he’s doing, from the words he chooses to the environment he’s created to the revelation that a “living prophet of God” is lurking in his basement, is part of a theatrical, deliberately dramatic grand reveal. Like so many sermons in our lives, it’s also meant to wear the girls down, to get Paxton and Barnes into a place of such fear and weakness that they will hang on his every word.
This is Mr. Reed’s mission, and when this mission suddenly includes cutting Sister Barnes’ throat, the rest of his dogma becomes quite clear to Sister Paxton.
I’m 31. I’m sick, tired, drunk beyond reason. My family doesn’t know what to do. I’ve been in hospitals, I’ve talked to social workers about potential rehab stays. I’ve admitted there’s a problem, and that’s the first step, right? So why is nothing working?
I go to a meeting, where I’m presented with a simple choice: Do you want to live or do you want to die? I want to live—I want to see what’s beyond this vodka haze, this malnourished zombie existence. I’m told that the first step is not admitting I have a problem. It’s admitting I’m powerless, that control is now beyond me.
I’m told to pray and I’m hesitant, like so many of us are. I’m told that I can pray in whatever way I wish, because it’s not just about a “Higher Power” or a God. It’s about stating your wishes, your needs, your hopes, clearly for yourself and for the universe. It’s true prayer in that it is an offering with no explicit promise of a return.
I get better in all the cliched ways one would expect to get better. I get wiser, too, because I understand that I don’t have the faith thing figured out, and I’m not sure any of us do. It’s not about rules or sacred names or rote recitation. It’s about getting from one day to the next, finding the thing that helps you walk that path, whatever the path is, whatever the destination.
It’s about survival.
Earlier in the film, before her friend is murdered, before she’s been ushered into a dark basement, before she’s descended still deeper into a freezing prison where Mr. Reed makes his final revelation, Sister Paxton arrives at the essence of why she believes what she believes.
“We know it’s true because of how it makes us feel,” she says.
Mr. Reed, excited, agrees, and we later learn that he agrees because of how his “one true religion” makes him feel. His one true religion, of course, is control. That’s all any religion is, and so Mr. Reed has boiled his version down to the essentials, to a carefully constructed environment where he is not only in charge, but utterly dominant. He lies, he manipulates, he locks doors, all so he can keep women in cages in a state of utter, delirious subservience.
This is, of course, awful, and it’s the source of the film’s greatest sticking point for its detractors. When we learn that Mr. Reed is, for all his pageantry, still little more than a misogynistic sociopath who’s talked his way into doing whatever he wants, there’s a tendency to be disappointed, to wish for something more. Wouldn’t it have been cooler if he’d found some kind of hidden occult secret? Wouldn’t it have been more fun with eldritch beasts beyond the veil?
Perhaps, but that’s not what Heretic is.
Because Mr. Reed is charming, intelligent, warm, hilarious, and played by Hugh Grant, we want to not only hear his pitch, but see the conclusion, and we want it to be something special. It’s what we want out of every potential faith, every self-help system, every life path someone else has promised us will work out great. If we buy the ticket and take the ride, we want that ride to lead somewhere great. We want to be told that God will really save us all regardless of sin or deviation from dogma. We want to be understood as we are, and when we’re not, we walk away dejected, enveloped in darkness.
The conclusions of Mr. Reed are that darkness personified, the understanding that the world and its various systems of power are cruel and manipulative and usually designed to make us think, feel, or be a certain way. Don’t make your own choices about your body, don’t go in that bathroom, don’t call yourself a girl if we decide you’re not a girl. Don’t marry that person, don’t help that friend get an abortion, just let us handle everything. We have the answers. Our world is his self-built church blown up to the size of a planet, full of traps to spring and mechanisms to set us off balance. It’s a world full of people grasping for control.
What, then, do we do? What does Sister Paxton, the one survivor of this dark night of the soul, do when confronted with the understanding that everything she thought she knew about the truth of the world is more frightening than she could have imagined?
She prays. She prays even after she reveals that she knows prayer doesn’t work. She prays because it’s nice to think about someone else, nice to acknowledge what you’ve been through, where you’re going. She prays out of sheer survival, and in the end she is freed.
Sister Paxton does not get the chance to show or tell us what she’ll do next, but what Heretic leaves us with is a brief yet clear rebuttal to the darkness of Mr. Reed. It leaves us with quiet, unassuming, exhausted hope, because even in the face of that darkness, Sister Paxton endures. We endure. Through every religious lecture, every crisis of faith, every departure from a church, every newfound understanding.
The one true religion is not control. It’s survival. It’s whatever we can do to make our lives a little easier, to take care of each other, to set our bodies in the gap between the darkness and the light. Heretic is about the raw, miraculous power of surviving, and that makes it one of 2024’s best genre films.
Categorized:Editorials
