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

Work

4 February 2025

4 min read

Severance: the ins and outs of seeking oblivion

We can't contain trauma to just one sphere of our lives.

Josh Richards

Josh is a curate in London, and is completing a PhD in theology.

In a retro-future styled office, workers stand or sit around a pod of desks.

Apple TV.

How far would you go to stop yourself doing late-night emails? Or what would you be willing to do to escape those painful memories? Severance, returning for its second season on AppleTV+, explores an extreme solution to both.

The show follows a group of office workers at Lumon who have had their memories severed: when outside of work they do not remember what they do at work and when at work they do not know anything about their lives outside. The work-self, referred to as an 'innie', enters the elevator at 5pm and immediately finds themselves back in the elevator at 9am the next day. They feel rested without any memory of the rest. Their "outie" blinks at 9am and then it is 5pm.

Adam Scott's protagonist, Mark, joined Lumon Industries as a severed employee working in "Macrodata Refinement" (MDR) as a result of losing his wife. In an episode early in the second season, one character recounts Mark telling them that he applied for the role because it felt like he was "choking on her ghost." Being severed offers Mark hours each working day where a version of him can work oblivious to this grief.

Of course, Mark's employer is up to something sinister, though exactly what remains unclear even to the innies. Lumon is at times terrifying, at times goofy and always unsettling. Innies are mistreated but cannot communicate with their outie beyond what Lumon allows. Even in these conditions, the small MDR team, each with no more than a couple of years' worth of memories, find purpose in their relationships with one another and in seeking to understand their bosses' designs.

Severance has attracted a lot of attention and reflection. Writing for the Financial Times, Emma Jacobs concludes that the show points us to our impossible longing for a boundaried life. The Northeastern University academic Tomas Elliot proposes that Severance can be read as an inversion of The Matrix: employees knowingly placing themselves in a state of naivety. Jacobs and Elliot both read the show as pointing to the paradoxical nature of modern work as both the cause of discontentment and the place many look to for a sense of purpose and fulfilment.

Instability cannot be contained to one sphere of life. Life is hard and so is work. Neither can offer escape from the other.

At the heart of many of the questions that Severance raises is the relationship between work and identity. Most of us live with a sense that who we are is found in our relationships. Work means something because it is one of the places we are most powerfully shaped by and shape relationships with colleagues, competitors, consumers and everyone else. Work becomes destructive when it cultivates destructive relationships in the workplace or when it displaces other forms of community and sources of identity.

The process of severance protects outies from the formative power of workplace relationships: their strains and their joys. No doubt we could each imagine benefits to this. However, it leaves Mark's outie paralysed by grief because he has denied himself a key source of relationships through which he could begin to heal, integrating that grief into a new sense of self.

Just as Mark's innie is protected by the outie's grief, the outie is protected from discovering who he could be without his wife. As the series progresses, it becomes less clear whether Mark's motivation is the fear of grief's crushing burden or the fear that one day the burden may ease.

In his book Resonance, Hartmut Rosa writes:

Time and again, human beings come to discover that they can become "different people" in different contexts. And under the highly dynamic conditions of late modernity, the task of finding out who we really are collides… with repeatedly having to "reinvent" and creatively redefine ourselves. That said reinvention also should be "completely authentic" is surely one of the more pointed paradoxes of the present age.

As Rosa notes, the dynamism of contemporary market forces produces a dynamism in our sense of identity, which can be experienced as instability. One response to this instability—and all the other humiliations and challenges of living at this time—is to look for ways of separating "work" and "life", to carve out a space where I can be free from constant performance and reinvention. And yet, as Severance shows us, whatever part of ourselves we designate as "life" or "outie", it cannot be free from pain and sometimes we will escape to, rather than from, "work".

Instability cannot be contained to one sphere of life. Life is hard and so is work. Neither can offer escape from the other. Some things must be resisted and some must simply be lived with. Both can only be done together. Ultimately, both can only be done if we are held in and defined by a relationship secure through any failure or loss. Seeking such a relationship is a life's work, for both innies and outies.

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