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.

Column

Culture

Justice

Trauma

17 March 2025

4 min read

Do victim statements offer up drama or justice?

Recent tragic cases highlight the changing audience for impact statements.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A classical court house with a statue on top of a dome.

The Old Bailey.

It’s a lesser-known irony of ancient history that it was Roman Emperor Tiberius who introduced Justitia to the pantheon of the gods, as the goddess of justice. Ironic in that it was Tiberius’s minion, Pontius Pilate, in remote Judea, who had history’s worst day at the office, administering Roman justice so cack-handedly on an insurgent preacher and miracle-worker from Nazareth that he sparked a chain of events on which a whole new system of (at least western) justice was founded.

Justitia was the antecedent of Lady Justice, whose statue adorns the dome of London’s central criminal court at the Old Bailey – and many other courts besides. She invariably holds the judicial symbols of weighing scales and a sword. And she is often blindfolded, though not on the Old Bailey, despite such constitutional eminences as the shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick erroneously claiming she is.

The blindfold, scales and sword symbolise Lady Justice’s impartiality, the primacy of evidence and the equality of all before the law. We’ve grown accustomed to the rule of law in our democracy being applied blindly and without emotion. Convicted murderers are often described as having acted in cold blood and we expect justice to be served on them in the same manner, coldly.

It’s in that context that I want to examine one way in which Lady Justice is going a bit wrong these days. It’s not about miscarriage of justice, so much as the dispassion of it. I’m talking about the victim impact statement, introduced in the UK in 1996, which comes between conviction and sentencing.

It was meant to be an opportunity for victims and their families to tell the court of the impact and effects of the crime committed upon them. And, in that sense, to assist the judge or other sentencing authority to deliver an appropriate degree of punishment. So it is about the impact of the crime on those most directly affected by it.

That appears no longer to be solely – or even in some instances partly – the case. The victim statement now seems to be an opportunity for the irreparably damaged to sound off at the defendant, to vent their pain and anger and contempt for and at the wretched convict.

Take John Hunt, the BBC correspondent who lost his wife Carol and two of their three daughters, Hannah and Louise, to a multiple murder (and rape) one day last summer. His victim statement was less about the unimaginable effect these crimes have had on him and his surviving daughter, Amy, than about the divine judgment he would wish to call down on the murderer, Louise’s former partner Kyle Clifford.

It really served no judicial purpose. It’s impossible to conceive that anything Hunt had to say had the slightest influence over the judge’s intention to pass down whole-life terms on Clifford, which he duly did. Its sole purpose seems to have been to allow Hunt to have his day in court, as it were, and who would wish to deny him that? But that does undermine the explicit purpose of the victim statement.

Hunt himself conceded as much at the start of his statement when he said of his victim statement:

“I initially misunderstood its purpose. Do I really need to detail the impact of having three quarters of my family murdered?”

He’s right – he didn’t. But he saw it as his “final opportunity” to address his family’s murderer. There followed an excruciating and heart-rending verbal attack on the convicted prisoner, culminating with the prophecy of his despatch to hell on his “dying day”:

“The screams of Hell, Kyle, I can hear them now. The red carpet will come out for you…”

I can’t know if Hunt would prefer the death penalty to be available to despatch his family’s killer immediately. One suspects he probably does. I oppose it, one reason being that it can leave no room for penance and redemption. We must surely all agree that Hunt gets a free pass on that rationale, but with no more severe sentence available than that which was passed, again we must ask what the purpose of the victim statement was.

If it is simply to wish a hellish death on the perpetrator, then again we need to ask what purpose is being served and, indeed, if it’s healthy both for the judicial process and for the victim who delivers the statement.

The same thought arose at a pre-sentencing hearing of the recent Nottingham murderer, when the son of one of the three victims, James Coates, told the killer:

“Valdo Calocane, you claim the voices told you to kill these innocent people. Now listen to me, kill yourself.”

Is that about impact? I don’t think so. I fear it has more to do with theatre in a media age that is insatiable for drama. Part of the purpose of the law is to maintain a distance between those affected emotionally and those who have committed crimes against them.

Remove that and we reduce not only some of the justice for criminals to mere spectacle, but also in some degree respect for their victims and, indeed, the quality of mercy.

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