The villain in “Heretic” is operating a long-term scheme to commit assault on women and religion.

The new horror movie hits theaters Nov. 8 and stars Hugh Grant as Mr. Reed, a warped charlatan who seeks to control, degrade and commit violence against women, including two female missionaries, in an anti-religious rage.

In short, Reed wants to kill the women from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but first he wants to take their freedom, murder their faith and replace it with his own twisted beliefs.

The movie joins a growing line of Hollywood vehicles dismissive of what believers find sacred. “Heretic” is the first to have a villain deceive, entrap and commit violence against sister missionaries. The trailers and premiere of the film at the Toronto International Film Festival last month drew both praise for Grant and concern for women and missionaries.

It’s also drawn strong reaction from Latter-day Saints and the church itself.

Church issues statement about ‘Heretic’

“Like many Hollywood productions, this is a work of fiction and is not based on actual events,” church spokesman Doug Andersen said in statement provided to the Deseret News. “It portrays the graphically violent treatment of women, including people of faith, and those who provide volunteer service to their communities. Any narrative that promotes violence against women because of their faith or undermines the contributions of volunteers runs counter to the safety and wellbeing of our communities.”

Andersen said the church has nearly 80,000 missionaries serving around the world and that it provides them with a thorough program of physical and emotional safety training.

“Our commitment is to foster a culture of respect, empowerment, and safety for all individuals,” he said.

Some have succeeded in portraying religion accurately and appealing to believers. The director of “The Chosen,” one of those success stories, spoke at Brigham Young University this week.

‘Religion becomes an easy foil’

A24, the studio that produced the film, displayed ads inside the Salt Lake airport earlier this month during the Church of Jesus Christ’s semiannual general conference. Reminiscent of missing persons messages, they show photos of the women who play the sister missionaries under the provocative headline, “What happened to PAXTON and BARNES?” The disturbing ads greeted the millions of passengers — and the hundreds of Latter-day Saint missionaries — who travel through the airport each month.

“Religion becomes an easy foil,” said Diane Winston, Knight Center Chair in Media and Religion at the University of Southern California. Think about the number of horror movies focused on Catholic priests and/or exorcism, she said.

Many Latter-day Saints will object to “Heretic” from the opening street scenes that portray the young missionary women talking crassly about sex.

The most sacrilegious moment comes in the following scene, when the sister missionaries encounter a group of women about their own ages, late teens or early 20s. The result is an encounter ending with the group of women simultaneously pulling up the skirt of a missionary to reveal her temple garments, the sacred underclothing worn by adult, temple-attending Latter-day Saints.

The entire movie hinges on the sister missionaries walking through Reed’s door, so one of his earliest lies is that his wife is home. For their safety, Latter-day Saint sister missionaries do not enter a residence without another woman present. Reed has prepared a deception so he can reel them into both his home and his version of Bible bashing.

One reviewer wrote that a self-absorbed Mr. Reed forces the missionaries to listen to his anti-religious TED talk.

“The experience of meeting a condescending know-it-all is a really common experience for Latter-day Saint missionaries,” said Christopher Blythe, a Latter-day Saint convert and BYU English professor who co-hosts the “Angels and Seerstones” podcast with his wife, Christine.

Hugh Grant goes rogue

Writers-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (who co-created and co-wrote “A Quiet Place” and directed “Nightlight” and “Haunt”) have nothing new to add in their attacks on religion except jokes. They acknowledge borrowing ideas from Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, well known atheists authors, and Charles Darwin. They have Mr. Reed mix those and other ideas together in a stew with humor and heat it up in the microwave.

Grant long ago did a heel turn away from romantic comedies. He has been the villain across most of the past decade, in projects like the TV miniseries “The Undoing” and movies like “Paddington 2” and “The Gentlemen.” He showed irritation at the Toronto premiere and on the red carpet when some expressed surprise at his choice to move from romantic lead to blackguard.

“For the last eight or nine years, I’ve done freaks and weirdos, the baddies,” he said at the Toronto premiere.

There are enough examples now that Screen Rant even published a ranking of Grant’s best performances as a villain, noting that his true power in those roles lies in his intellect. “Sneaking around and gathering information is what (one of his characters) does best,” the list noted, “and Grant easily embodies this conniving spirit.”

Beck and Woods don’t tap into that conniving spirit so much as sink a deep well. In Toronto, Grant said he was a willing accomplice.

“Well, I was lucky, because I’m not a great believer,” he said to laughter in Toronto. Then he said something else that made the audience laugh even harder. Given his character’s treacherous actions, it certainly was a cunning comment.

“In fact,” Grant said, “I found Reed and I had an awful lot in common.”

Why the writers of ‘Heretic’ attacked religion

A majority of people around the world are weary of religious stereotypes. A global 2022 poll found 78% of respondents said religious stereotypes need to be addressed by society as much or more than gender and race stereotypes. Harris X conducted the 2022 Global Faith and Media Study that surveyed 10,000 people in 18 countries and five languages.

“Everyone’s saying, ‘Stop stereotyping my faith,’ and Hollywood doesn’t see that,” Radiant Foundation executive director Angela Redding told the Deseret News earlier this year.

Redding said 61% of the poll’s respondents said media perpetuates faith-based stereotypes rather than protecting against them. Other polls show how religion improves wellbeing, mental health, spirituality and more.

The vibe in the Princess of Wales Theatre in Toronto was non-religious. The representative who introduced “Heretic” at the festival praised the team that chose to premiere it on a Sunday and said, “Welcome to the church of cinema!”

Beck and Woods were dismissive of religious belief in the Q&A that followed the viewing.

“We were raised Christian,” Woods said, “and then you make friends, and you get married and your wives and friends and family have different beliefs than what you grew up with and you kind of expand your mind. I think in many ways this is the most personal project that we’ve ever been a part of, because we got to kind of express some of these feelings and fears and conversations that we’ve been having.”

Woods is married to Julia Glausi, who graduated from Brigham Young University with a degree in Theater and Media Arts. Glausi is credited as a producer on “Heretic.” The women who play the sister missionaries, Sophie Thatcher (“Yellowjackets”) and Chloe East (“The Fabelmans”) are former Latter-day Saints.

Winston, the media and faith chair at USC, also works with the Faith in Media Initiative, which collaborated with HarrisX on a 2023 global survey that found 80% of people want the entertainment industry to improve its portrayals of faith, making them more accurate.

“It sounds like the people who made this film have their own issues about religion, and this was one way to exorcize them,” she said.

Leveraging Latter-day Saints in search of a hit show

A steady stream of shows about Latter-day Saints has turned into a downpour. Bravo is airing Season 5 of “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.” Hulu recently renewed “Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” for a second season and has several other shows in the sub-sub-genre. Over the weekend, Lifetime premiered a made-for-TV movie, “Mormon Mom Gone Wrong: The Ruby Franke Story.”

These are echoes of the “Mormon Moment” that surrounded Mitt Romney’s presidential campaigns from 2007-12, said Christopher Blythe, the folklore podcaster. Those echoes are a form of leveraging Latter-day Saint tropes. In much the same way some TV series use sex scenes in early episodes to draw an initial audience before moving on to story, some producers and directors use Latter-day Saints as “a strange attractor,” in the words of Latter-day Saint filmmaker Barrett Burgin.

“Writers hope the audience will stay because of the storyline, but that they’ll gather, at least initially, to learn more about those oddball Mormons or the Amish or whoever,” said Christine Blythe, the podcaster who with her husband serves as co-president of the Folklore Society of Utah.

“Mormons become this great gimmick for mainstream media, because people are curious. … People are going to come to learn a little bit about Mormons, but they’re really going to get an earful about conservative belief at large,” she said.

In fact, in Toronto Beck and Woods said they wrote the first scenes involving the sister missionaries a decade ago because the writers believed they were such a good hook for a movie. They then shelved the project to dive into atheist works so they could give Mr. Reed the sheen of an anti-religious genius.

Catholics, Muslims, evangelicals, Hindus, Jewish groups and others have complained about their treatment in movies, said Winston, the media and religion chair at USC.

In fact, many Latter-day Saints feel their faith is often ridiculed in popular culture. A recent study by More in Common found that 60% of Latter-day Saints say they are portrayed unfavorably by TV shows and movies.

“I understand why members of the church feel singled out by these bad representations, but Hollywood spares no one,” Winston said “… I think that everyone is subjected to this kind of problematic representation and the wheel keeps turning. Most religions issue a press statement saying this is not a fair representation of us, and that’s that.”

Reviews and reactions to ‘Heretic’

Behina Doroodgar, a University of Toronto graduate student who attended the premiere of “Heretic” in Toronto, said she is learning more about the church from reality shows. “The Mormons are a bit more other to us,” she said. “We don’t have any experience with them in our day-to-day lives. I think that they’re certainly more other than the majority of religions that you’ll come face-to-face with living in an area like Toronto.”

At the same time, the growth of the church into a global religion also draws attention, the Blythes said.

Doroodgar is studying comparative literature. She said Mr. Reed claimed to be a heretic but actually was organizing his own religion within his house. The sister missionaries had to become heretics to that system to find their footing and try and escape.

“I didn’t think particularly less or more of Latter-day Saints at the end,” she said, “though I was impressed by Sister Paxton’s ability to allow something like forgiveness to Mr. Reed, who appears to crawl back to religion at the end.”

The Hollywood Reporter’s reviewer says “Heretic” is more compelling when it is a three-character chamber drama.

“The charade between Mr. Reed, Paxton and Barnes helps to distract from the screenplay, which wobbles under analytical pressure,” the reviewer wrote. “Beck and Woods, at first, seem intent on interrogating the pitfalls of modern religion, but their narrative never goes all the way in its criticism. Once Mr. Reed moves on from his speeches and into more conventional horror-villain machinations, so too does Heretic distance itself from its most fiery theses. While it doesn’t totally diminish the thrill of watching Grant’s character revel in his own supposed cleverness, it does make the enterprise disappointingly shallow.”

How Hollywood could produce more well-rounded religious content

USC’s Winston said some filmmakers do a thoughtful job of creating characters who portray the positive role religious faith plays in the lives of characters. Terrence Malick, Luis Buñuel, Paul Schrader and Denis Villenueve have made interesting, provocative statements about religion or depicted interesting characters motivated by religion “with sensitivity and grace,” she said.

“It would be nice if moviemakers portrayed religion in a better light than they tend to do,” Winston said, “because although we see in the world today a lot of instances of why religion can be deeply problematic and be implicated in wars and violence, I think for many more people, religion is something which provides comfort, which provides a sense of transcendence, a sense of belonging, a sense of community, a sense of life being worth living and that we’re all blessed to have this experience.”

At its best, religion asks profound questions that should lead to great filmmaking, Winston said: “How do we lead good lives? What does it mean to be a moral person? How do we show our love? How do we show gratitude for what we have? What is our meaning?”

“To some extent, they’re questions that probably a lot of people don’t want to deal with,” she said, “because they might have to rethink some of their choices, and they might be questions that they’re uncomfortable with, because nobody likes to have to really account for how they’re spending their time, because we all think we’re going to live forever.”

Another member of Faith in Media Initiative, Josh Good, suggested a scene from the Netflix series “Beef” as an example of a portrayal that captures the importance that religion plays in many lives.

The Blythes understand that stereotypes and folklore are part of narrative storytelling. Watching a sensationalized depiction of Latter-day Saints really isn’t the way to understand them, they said.

“If you want to know something about a member of The Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints,” Christine Blythe said on their podcast, “go talk to one. One who is not promoting their own television show. Honestly, and I promise this is true, only a very small number of us are swingers or hitmen.”

Correction: An early version of this story misidentified actress Sophie Thatcher as Zoe Thatcher. The article has been updated.