Last year, a clip of Hugh Grant on the red carpet went viral — and immediately incited one of the most agonising rounds of discourse in recent memory.
It was the Oscars pre-show, and a fairly innocuous series of pleasantries turned spiky as Grant deflected each query — about his awards bets, about the provenance of his suit — with a stony sarcasm.
The questions came thick and fast: Was it hostility or humour? Was he awkward or merely British? Is there a difference?
Many protested that Grant’s wry demeanour had punctured his guileless screen persona — though, truthfully, he had already spent the better part of his career trying to undo the charisma on which he made his name.
Hugh Grant does not like to be thought of as a polite gentleman: “I’m a quite nasty piece of work and I think people should know that.” (Supplied: A24)
For decades now, he has repeated in interviews that he is not the hapless charmer of Notting Hill, or the bumbling heart-throb of Four Weddings and a Funeral, or the roguish Romeo of About a Boy.
“I get very annoyed when people think that I am … a polite gentleman,” he told Andy Cohen in 2015. “I’m a quite nasty piece of work and I think people should know that.”
A24’s new horror film, Heretic, should finally do the trick. It offers Grant his latest (and perhaps vilest) villain after a recent string of shady performances: think his smarmy baddie in Paddington 2 or his murky murder suspect in The Undoing.
Sophie Thatcher (left) and Chloe East play Mormon missionaries Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton. (Supplied: A24)
Heretic sees Grant treading the tightrope of his public image. His character — one Mr Reed — is a perfectly agreeable Englishman, the likes of which he’s played to exhaustion throughout his oeuvre.
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Except this Englishman is far more sinister. Beneath his affable grin and sparkling bon mots lies a barely concealed depravity that’s delightful to witness.
The film is a chamber play that unfolds mostly in Reed’s house of horrors. There’s a devilish storm brewing outside, and two young Mormon missionaries — the sheltered Sister Paxton (Chloe East) and the slightly shrewder Sister Barnes (Yellowjackets’ Sophie Thatcher) — have come to spread the good word.
The film unfolds mostly in Mr Reed’s house of horrors after he convinces the young missionaries his wife is also home. (Supplied: A24)
They’re technically prohibited from entering any setting without another woman present — for their own safety, they explain. But Reed assures them his wife is just steps away in the kitchen (conveniently out of view, of course), so in they bound, all too eager to enlist a new recruit.
The pair’s proselytising zeal is matched by Reed’s own curiosity. He knows just a little too much about the nuances of their religion — its stipulations and superstitions, its history and its controversies.
What begins as jovial repartee quickly becomes an outright battle of ideas: between faith and doubt, god and man, good and evil.
Hugh Grant has told ABC News Breakfast Heretic is “edgy” because “discussing religion — particularly Christianity — was always taboo … because the American market, a lot of it’s quite Bible-belty [sic]”. (Supplied: A24)
It may sound a touch lofty on paper, but Heretic only gets screwier the deeper it tunnels — literally tunnels, as we venture into increasingly subterranean territory filled with a Halloween party’s worth of nightmarish props: rusty chains and creepy statues, arcane drawings that edge towards the demonic.
Above all, though, Heretic understands that there’s nothing more terrifying than a man soliloquising about his religious theories.
“I was always afraid I was going to go to hell.” Sophie Thatcher told Marie Claire she channelled her Mormon upbringing for the role of Sister Barnes. (Supplied: A24)
If directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods broke out with their screenplay for the 2018 creature feature A Quiet Place, then this film may as well be called A Loquacious Place. Grant spends most of the movie spouting deranged conspiracies to his unlucky audience of two — more trapped than rapt — with a grandiloquence halfway between TED talk and atheist edgelord.
It’s enough to make even the most patient listener long for the afterlife’s sweet embrace.
In one brilliantly mortifying monologue, Grant draws a very tenuous arc linking everything from theology to Radiohead, board games to Jar Jar Binks. Mormonism is simply Christianity’s “zany spin-off”, he concludes in the ultimate sacrilegious clunker, holding up Monopoly’s Bob Ross edition by way of comparison.
Chloe East was raised a Mormon and told Time Magazine: “Depending on how you were raised, everyone has a different perspective on the movie and what it means.” (Supplied: A24)
With an endless procession of non-sequiturs and attempted gotchas, Grant’s diatribe is surely familiar to anyone who has met an overly pugnacious stranger at a bar or watched a Ricky Gervais video.
If Heretic were actually invested in any of its ecclesiastical inquiries or ethical debates, it might be an altogether thornier — though likely drier — film.
Instead, it uses its religious overtures to power a funhouse crammed with classic horror tricks, — and at least one old-fashioned jump scare.
It’s good, filthy fun — and it’s Grant in all his nasty glory.
Heretic is showing in cinemas from Thursday, November 28.
