Review

Belief

Culture

Film & TV

15 November 2024

4 min read

Heretic: Hugh Grant’s brilliance wrestles this tranquilized take on holy horror

If not original, a dissection of belief needs to be sincere and agile.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

Hugh Grant prepares to eviscerate the script.

Halloween night: the perfect setting for a horror film. Religious horror: the perfect horror sub-genre. The supernatural invading the natural, darkness swallowing the light, tension and suspense assaulting the placidity we all crave, and doubt gnawing away at faith. All these reversals of the order we try to live in are on offer in Heretic. This is a ghoulish and ghastly offering from writer/directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who are no strangers to the genre. In Heretic they bring the best that horror cinema has to offer: simplicity.

The plot and script are lean enough to effortlessly perform the twists and contortions needed to keep the viewer off-guard and on the edge of their seat. The script is tight, with some wonderful opportunities to soliloquise and dialogue that is deliciously awkward and painful. The camera work is almost cruel in its relentlessness. This is not a film of jump scares. Here the camera lingers, and lingers…and lingers. Tight close ups on frightened faces and sinister smiles. Slow pans round a room, promising a sudden shock of relief that never comes – only more anxiety.

The camera refuses to make the experience easy, but insists on letting the atmosphere and semiotics drive the audience to the point of tears. Such a focused and aggressive camera needs performers who won’t shy away but will grab it and wrestle with it! Thankfully, the performances are superb across the board. It's basically a three-hander, carried by Sophie East, Chloe Thatcher, and the indominable Hugh Grant (more about him later).

East and Thatcher play two young Mormon missionaries – Sister Paxton and Sister Barnes - who spend their days walking the streets of a small American town in the mountains. In between dispiriting attempts to communicate their faith with an apathetic and even derisive public, they wile away the hours discussing their faith, their hopes and dreams, the perception of Mormonism in the popular culture, and the marketing of ‘magnum condoms’. Sister Paxton is earnest and zealous, desperate to prove herself as a missionary by converting at least one person. Sister Barnes is a little more reserved, almost cynical. There is less fervour, a hint of weariness, even the lurking sense of doubt?

The two young ladies end an exhausting day with a visit to an isolated mountain-top cottage where they believe the seemingly kindly and bumbling English gent, Mr. Reed, is a prospective convert. Who else bumbles like Hugh Grant? It’s a joy to watch. What they hope will be a pleasant chat about their faith slowly descends into a horrifying and twisted psychological torture session, where the concepts of faith, doubt, religion, prophesy, and institutional thinking are all examined.

I dare not say much more. This is a film which hides its twists well and uses the mundanities of blueberry pie and Monopoly to chillingly hilarious effect.

However…

Having heaped praise upon praise, I must admit that I left the cinema feeling slightly disappointed. I love horror cinema. I love religion – so much so that I’ve made it my day job. I love them in combination that appears pretty frequently, from the giddy heights of The Exorcist to the drudgery that is The Exorcist: Believer. This means that most of the themes that can be explored have been explored. Originality is nearly impossible, and not really necessary – but exploring the themes with sincerity and agility would be nice. The script might be acrobatic, but the thematic exposition is about as plodding as a tranquilised elephant with a limp.

It is bad.

Again, I don’t want to give the twists and turns away, but quite quickly a dissonance between the brilliance of the dialogue and the turgidity of the theme appears, and it doesn’t…go…away! What is faith and what is doubt? Good. What is belief and what is disbelief? Good. No. Scrap that. ‘RELIGION IS ALL JUST MAN MADE!’ Okay, we could explore that. ‘NO. JESUS IS BASICALLY HORUS.’ Right, but let’s tease out the nuance. ‘NO! RELIGION IS JUST A SYSTEM OF CONTROL!’

Mr Reed suddenly morphs into the most tiresome bore. A cross between the theological illiteracy of Dawkins and the pathological obsession with power of Foucault. It is possible that this is part of the point – that this was intended to be a witty and incisive invective against institutionalism (especially institutionalised misogyny), and the ladies do land some philosophical counterpunches which expose the emptiness of Mr Reed’s rantings – but it just wasn’t done subtly or adeptly enough. What promises to be a thematic exposition of the nature of belief turns into a fairly lumbering and ponderous lecture on how belief full-stop is a ‘system of control’. We get it. We’ve been hearing this for centuries, and at a new fever pitch since the early noughties. Again…originality isn’t essential if the same old theme is explored well. I just didn’t feel it was. I felt it was a chore.

Yet (another twist coming!), Mr Reed is still compelling. However boring the thematic content, I was never bored. Hugh Grant is superlative as the sinister, fanatical, hateful, charming, charismatic, hilarious Mr Reed. He delivers lines filled with acid yet dipped in honey. He smiles that singular smile as both wolf and lamb at once. His eyes twinkle with light that is both warm and yet dead and cold. He delivers laugh out loud speeches with absolute relish. The theme might be being butchered, but when the butcher is Hugh Grant you sort of forgive it all.

I would advise you see this film. It's excellent on every technical level and an almost perfect tension builder. It's not perfect, and those who are genuinely interested in the theme are likely to roll their eyes as the early promise of interesting study devolves into something sub-Sam Harris. But ignore that and just enjoy the twists and turns. Ignore it and focus on Hugh Grant. He’s never been better.

**** Stars.

Review

Culture

Film & TV

Trauma

24 July 2025

5 min read

Unforgivable: Jimmy McGovern’s brave storytelling

Intelligent, understanding, and compassionate stories of a family affected by abuse

Henry Corbett

Henry Corbett, a vicar in Liverpool and chaplain to Everton Football Club.

A family sit together watching a trial in a court.

BBC.

Jimmy McGovern would rather be called a storyteller than a writer.

And what important, life-changing stories he has told.

His 1996 TV film Hillsborough told the true story of the disaster in which 97 Liverpool supporters lost their lives. His 2014 story Common was written after he received a letter from a woman whose son was in prison unjustly under the Joint Enterprise Law. His 2017 BBC series Broken showed a caring priest dealing with a mix of situations, including the often hidden, catastrophic effects of gambling addiction.

In those, as in all the stories he has told over the last 45 years, he seeks to serve the story, to be each character’s best barrister where possible, and to help an understanding of the often-complex situations the characters find themselves in.

Brave, important stories, and here is another extremely brave story.

A psychologist who worked with sex offenders contacted McGovern with the stories she was encountering in her role, and she mentioned the disturbing fact that so many people who abuse children have themselves been abused. A story that needs to be told? So to Unforgivable.

Joe, played by Bobby Schofield, is in prison for sexually abusing his young nephew Tom. Tom blames himself for not saying more at the time. Joe’s sister Anna, played by Anna Friel, is trying to cope with her son Tom’s silences that are only interrupted by a “Yes” or a “No”. She has to go into school after Tom has been involved in a fight and amidst all this her and Joe’s mother dies, “from a broken heart”. Who broke her heart? Joe, surely. Joe’s father Brian, played by David Threlfall (the cast are all brilliant), agrees with his daughter Anna: they are both furious with Joe. His mother was the only person from the family who visited Joe in prison. Joe cannot come to his mother’s funeral. And young silent Tom has an older brother Peter who sits at the table with a stressed mother Anna and a non-communicative younger brother Tom. The whole family is blitzed.

The mother’s funeral happens, and then Joe’s release date from prison comes. Where can he go? Right safeguarding procedures are put in place and he goes to St Maura’s, a place under the caring watchful eye of Katherine, an ex-nun, played by Anna Maxwell Martin.

Joe is ashamed, penitent: “I am just a piece of s**t”. He gets spotted as he walks alone by the River Mersey and gets beaten up. In hospital the nurse asks “Why?”. He tells her that he is a child abuser and wonders if the nurse will continue to help him. She does. Is his life worth living, shunned by family, beaten up by lads who know him?

Two things move him to action. The ex-nun goes with him to therapy sessions and tells him of her breast cancer. He is sorry to hear that. And he tells her the story of his abuse at the hands of Mr Patterson the football coach of his very successful under-12 team, and not only of his abuse but of one of his team mates too.

The case against Mr Patterson goes to court, the family hear of Joe’s abuse, and Anna has another level of stress to deal with: if the abused often become abusers, then what about her Tom, will he become an abuser? Of course, not necessarily, and the other abused player tells Joe he didn’t go on to become an abuser.

Not for one moment is the drama being soft on the horrors of child abuse. Joe was wrong, totally wrong. His act of abuse has and is affecting the whole family massively and tragically, and he should go to prison, serve his sentence and when he comes out there should be vigilant, effective safeguarding measures put in place to stop any repeated abuse. And child abusers can be very manipulative, can put on acts of contrition, and go on to abuse others. Not for one moment should we lower our guard.

So where does this leave us? Many of us at some stage may be in the company of a family where a shocking, shattering act of child abuse has taken place. How do we respond? Do we blank the offender, wish them dead or in prison with the key thrown away? Are they inhuman monsters, just “pieces of s**t” as Joe describes himself? But Joe is a human being, he does seem penitent, and he was himself abused and he has taken his abuser to court to stop that person abusing others. What of others in the family? Anna’s hate, the father’s hate, the older brother feeling side-lined, Tom’s monosyllabic “yes” and “no”s, the desperate burdens they are carrying. How do we respond to them?

A story-teller’s role is sometimes to ask awkward questions. Here is a final awkward question: is Joe forgivable or unforgivable?

It’s also an ancient question. The unforgivable sin that Jesus talks of is the sin against the Holy Spirit, and that is calling good evil and evil good. Joe calls out his abusive act as the work of a piece of s**t. He goes after the person who abused him to prevent others suffering from a horrible, wrong, bad, traumatising act.

I’ll finish with thoughts from people who know something of abuse, torture, injustice.

Bryan Stevenson, the American lawyer and activist who has worked with many people on death row, says: "Each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done."

Desmond Tutu and his daughter Mpho who lived through the atrocities and abuses of apartheid say in their Book of Forgiving that forgiveness is not easy, is not a sign of weakness, is not forgetting, and is not quick. They suggest a fourfold path: telling the story, naming the hurt, granting forgiveness, and, depending on the situation, renewing or releasing the relationship.

Jimmy McGovern tells the story and names the hurts movingly, bravely, and compellingly.

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