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.

Article

Culture

Suffering

23 October 2025

5 min read

Protection from evil shouldn’t rely on a blue glass bead

Faith goes beyond culture in my beloved Türkiye

Becky Ruth

Becky is a a writer living in Istanbul.

Blue evil eye charms hang among a jewellery display

Vik Walker, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

‘Mashallah, your baby is so ugly!’.

The elderly ‘auntie’ stopped me in the street, exclaiming over my 3-month-old baby, who was strapped to my front, and before I could translate in my mind what she’d said, quick as lightning, she had safety-pinned a teeny tiny glass blue eyeball to the sling.

I had just moved to Türkiye from the UK and was waist-deep in culture shock. My new friend explained to me that she had pinned the ‘nazar’, a little blue bead in the shape of an eye, on my baby to protect him from evil spirits or anyone's jealousy that would cause them to wish him harm. Mashallah means ‘God wills it’, and calling the baby ‘ugly’ was also for double protection, to distract the evil eye from the fact that he was cute (he was!).

This belief in an evil eye dates back to ancient Greek and Roman times. The little blue nazar represents both the evil eye itself - a widely-feared, dangerous power that could harm others, including their crops or livelihood – and at the time offers protection against it. From Azerbaijan to Pakistan, multiple countries in central Asia and the Middle East believe in the nazar or a variation of it.

Today, the nazar is such a deeply ingrained cultural thread of life here in Türkiye that, nine years later, I hardly notice it anymore. Nazars are the country’s unofficial brand logo, and the bright azure blue with a white iris and black pupil is the colour palette for Türkiye.

Wherever I go, little blue eyeballs stare at me. From crinkly-faced kind teyzes (aunties) to the young influencer girls on Instagram, nazar necklaces are everywhere. Glass blue nazars decorate walls, tables, and trees.

Just yesterday, I was at a friend's clothes studio; for her grand opening, all the gifts from well-wishing friends for her new business were nazar-themed: a tray, a paperweight, and earrings.

So how does ‘nazar’ work? If someone compliments you or anything about you, it's believed that it can attract the evil eye with a harmful curse against you or your possessions. To cancel out the curse, there's a selection of phrases you can say, including ‘mashallah,’ or ‘Allah korusun’ (may God protect you).

Other ways you can ward off the unwanted attention of the evil eye include avoiding staring at children in the eyes for too long, spitting on the ground, and, of course, the most popular, hanging a blue glass evil eye bead wherever you can (there is even a huge one embedded on the front door threshold of our apartment.)

A close friend always tells me to pray a special nazar prayer over my youngest son because he has bright blue eyes, which she believes makes him more susceptible to the evil eye's powers. I respectfully tell her that I have a different belief, and I pray for my family for protection from Jesus. (Whom Muslims revere as a prophet, so this is acceptable to her).

As a woman of faith who has lived in Türkiye for nine years, there is so much of the beautiful Turkish culture that has become mine, and for that, I am so grateful. Living cross-culturally is a little like having a heart transplant - there's no going back. My views on health, parenting, family, and community are now all so broadened and different. But the nazar trend is something I haven't adopted. When I go shopping with my girlfriends, and they browse stunning gold necklaces with a tiny ‘nazar’ embedded in the pendant, I won’t buy one for myself.

Because faith goes one step beyond culture.

The evil eye is based on a superstition about jealousy that has malice at its core. It wants to wreak harm on others. Now, we don’t need to look far to see that we humans are pretty good at being selfish and greedy and hurting others to get what we want. Scroll through the news for five minutes, and we’re convinced of the presence of evil in our world.

But superstitious belief in the powers of nazar is not the way to ward it off.

The dictionary definition of superstition is: ‘a belief or way of behaving that is based on fear of the unknown and faith in magic or luck: a belief that certain events or things will bring good or bad luck. 'Both superstition and faith are about believing in things that can’t be seen. Superstition puts it all on you to follow some rules to avoid bad luck or evil. But that’s a bit like shooting in the dark. Believing in the nazar means you can obey all the rules of the system and hang blue beads everywhere… and you can still experience evil and suffering. A loved one gets sick. Problems at work. Whatever it might be. So, either the nazar didn’t work, or you didn’t do it right.

Faith, by contrast, still means you can experience evil and suffering – but the difference this time is, the outcome isn’t attached to a physical action you took. It's about a relationship with someone who cares about our fears rather than trusting in a blind action that may or may not work. And if we want protection from evil, we can we simply ask for it. No blue beads necessary.

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