THE “WORLD’S” OPINION – MUST SEE
It is quite easy to detect, in the strategy of the independent production company A24, the desire to revitalize a certain number of conventions, notably those of horror cinema, to go beyond primary stimulation and repetition. ad nauseam worn out and exhausted situations.
The recent films of Ari Aster as well as those of Ti West, for example, produced by A24, have revealed this project of going beyond clichés and weighting down cinematic fear with a certain depth and avowed awareness. At the risk of sinking, sometimes, into a form of counterproductive and pretentious intellectualism. Hereticby Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, avoids this pitfall while offering a device of terror whose originality is paradoxical: that which consists of going back to the sources of a type of story which is nevertheless wrung out by cinema.
Two young Mormon missionaries (Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East) are welcomed by a seemingly courteous and good-natured fifty-year-old during a door-to-door campaign. It's Hugh Grant who plays him with the good nature of a former male sex symbol who is now a housewife (apparently) and a car tidy. A conversation begins, in his living room, with the visitors, a duel during which, with unparalleled rhetorical skill, the man attempts to shake the convictions of the two proselytes.
Deaf threat
The verbal confrontation, although courteous, gradually darkens, a dull threat is felt. It is in these moments, in the slow and suffocating build-up of suspense built on the imminence of a long-unidentifiable danger, that the film by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods skilfully distinguishes itself. Heretic delves into the very sources of stories of terror, into the fairy tales themselves by proposing a sort of perverse and disturbing version (the issue is nevertheless the questioning of the existence of God) of Little Red Riding Hood, which splits here to find himself facing a wolf with murderous eloquence.
In its final moments, the film finds itself in more familiar territory, that of survival horrifying, entirely focused on how the prey can, or cannot, escape their fate. The scenario becomes more banal. Violence is unleashed when, thanks to a few furtive shots, we have identified the true and diabolical identity of the monster.
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