Heretic (2024) Review: Hugh Grant Builds a Locked-Room Horror Out of Pure Dialogue

This review reflects the author's personal opinion. Trumpwatcher is an independent film publication, not affiliated with any studio, streamer, or festival. We do not cover political content.

A serious heretic review needs to start with the lead performance, because Scott Beck and Bryan Woods's locked-room horror is functionally a chamber piece staged for a virtuoso, and Hugh Grant is in full command of the chamber for ninety of the film's hundred-and-ten minutes. The premise is built to constrain: two young missionaries, Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton, knock on the door of Mr. Reed, who invites them in for a conversation about belief that quickly stops being a conversation and starts being something else. Beck and Woods understand that horror generated from dialogue is the hardest kind to sustain, and they wire the screenplay so that every exchange is doing two things at once. The result is a horror film where the suspense is built from sentences.

If you are deciding whether to give the film its hundred and ten minutes: yes, in a theater with a quiet audience. The film loses substantial force on a noisy home setup because the soundtrack is so minimalist that every audience cough lands like a cut. In a quiet room or a respectful crowd, the picture works.

What Heretic gets right

Beck and Woods's deepest decision is to refuse the conventional horror grammar. There is no jump-scare cutting in the first hour, no swelling score, no overhead crane shot to signal that something is wrong. The film commits to the conversational mode and trusts that the conversation will produce the dread. The trust is earned scene by scene. By the time the picture starts to release horror grammar in the second hour, the audience has been trained to read the conversation as the actual battlefield, and the eventual visual horror lands as the consequence of language rather than as a relief from it.

The specifics

Cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung — working in his second feature with Beck and Woods after a long Park Chan-wook association — covers the dialogue in a series of static, almost theatrical masters. The camera moves only when the geography of the room changes; when Mr. Reed leads the missionaries from the entryway to the study to the basement, the camera moves with them in long unbroken tracking shots that quietly establish the architecture as a kind of cage. By the time the film cuts to its first hand-held shot, the audience reads the camera move as a loss of control, not a stylistic choice. That is craft. A standard horror film cuts handheld from the start. Beck, Woods, and Chung have been saving the destabilization for when it counts.

Spoilers are confined to a clearly labeled section near the end. Read freely until you reach it.

Where the film loses ground

The screenplay's biggest weakness is the third-act reveal, which asks the audience to accept a substantial conceptual leap that the conversational mode of the first two acts has not fully prepared. Beck and Woods make the leap as cleanly as the form allows, but a viewer who has been reading the film as a dialogue piece is going to feel the gear-change. Some viewers will land on the right side of the change; others will feel the film has chosen visual escalation over the talky discipline it had been promising. Neither reading is wrong.

A second observation: the screenplay leans on the protagonists' faith as the only counterweight to Mr. Reed's arguments, and while Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East both play the faith with real conviction, the dialectic is more uneven than it pretends to be. Mr. Reed's case is built across an hour of monologue with rhetorical flourishes; the missionaries' case is mostly a steady refusal to engage on his terms. The unevenness might be the point — the film is interested in what a refusal sounds like, not in what a counter-argument sounds like — but it leaves the dialectical balance slightly off.

How this film sits in its genre

The clearest siblings are Rod Serling's Twilight Zone in its mid-1960s chamber-piece episodes, M. Night Shyamalan's Knock at the Cabin (2023) for the locked-room horror premise, and Brian Bertino's The Strangers (2008) for the way a domestic interior can be slowly weaponized. Beck and Woods are closest to the Serling lineage in tone — the film is more talky than visceral — but they borrow Shyamalan's understanding that a single charismatic antagonist can carry an entire horror picture if the writing trusts him.

Readers tracking dialogue-driven horror should pair this with our recent Conclave piece on a different kind of procedural built on conversation, and our editing-and-pacing essay covers the cut-level discipline that Beck and Woods are demonstrating here. For the wider archive context, see our independent reviews collection.

Performances worth singling out

Hugh Grant gives the performance of his late career. As Mr. Reed, he has to play four registers — the charming host, the intellectual pedant, the patient predator, and, in the last act, something else — and the film works because Grant lets each register reveal itself underneath the previous one without ever cutting the seams. The single scene that defines the performance is the doorway exchange near the thirty-minute mark, where he gives the missionaries an out and then quietly closes the option. Grant plays the closing as hospitality. That is the entire trick of the picture.

Sophie Thatcher's Sister Barnes is the more theatrical of the two missionary performances and gets the bigger moments in the second hour. The performance to single out for a working heretic review, though, is Chloe East's Sister Paxton. East plays a character whose interior life is the film's actual question — does the faith survive contact with the kind of pressure Reed is applying? — and she answers the question through a sequence of micro-decisions about how to listen. The character could have been written and played as a screen-ready ingenue. East refuses to play her as that, and the picture is sharper for the refusal.

A quick note on craft

Editor Justin Li and the directors cut the dialogue with a respect for breath that is rare in contemporary horror. They let pauses run a beat past the comfortable point, and the held discomfort accumulates. A working heretic review has to credit the cutting because the cutting is what allows the dialogue to land as horror rather than as theater. The film never cuts away from a face that is doing work. That is the entire principle. The principle is enough to carry a film with this much restraint.

SPOILERS AHEAD — read only if you have watched the film

The basement sequence — the prophet trap, the literal revelation, the survival decision — is the moment the screenplay reveals that Beck and Woods have been writing a horror film about the cost of certainty rather than the content of belief. Mr. Reed is not actually arguing for any one position; he is demonstrating the architecture of conviction by performing it for an audience he expects will eventually capitulate. When Sister Paxton chooses, in the final scene, to refuse the architecture rather than the content, the film lands its argument: the missionary's faith is not what saves her. Her refusal to be persuaded by performance is what saves her.

Whether the ending lands as profound or as engineered depends on the viewer's appetite for a horror film that ends on an intellectual rather than a visceral release. The closing exchange between Paxton and the wounded Reed is shot in two static singles, with the cut on her words. A more conventional film would have cut on the kill. Beck and Woods cut on the refusal. That is the whole picture, and it is the right call.

The verdict

Trumpwatcher Score: 4.1 / 5

Rating: 4.1/5

Watch it in a theater with a quiet audience, or at home with the lights down and the phone in another room. The film depends on sustained attention to language; ambient noise breaks the spell. For a double feature, pair it with Shyamalan's Knock at the Cabin for the locked-room tradition or Rod Serling's Twilight Zone chamber episodes for the dialogue-driven horror lineage. Either pairing makes the case that horror, in the right hands, is still one of the most precise vehicles for argument.

For more on the contemporary horror tradition this picture extends, this heretic review sits in our independent reviews archive; the methodology behind our 4.1 verdict is documented at how we score films.

This article is the author's independent critical opinion and does not constitute professional advice. Trumpwatcher is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by any film studio, distributor, streaming service, festival, political party, or campaign. All trademarks, titles, and proper names referenced belong to their respective owners and are used for editorial identification only. We do not host, link to, or condone unauthorized copies of any film. Always watch films through official theatrical or licensed streaming channels.