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    • Hugh Grant’s villain meets a fateful end
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    Hugh Grant’s villain meets a fateful end

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    Spoiler alert! The next post discusses major plot points and the ending of “Heretic” (in theaters now), so take note if you haven’t seen it yet.

    Deep thoughts and deeper cuts permeate the religiously themed horror film “Heretic,” which puts a different spin on the scary movie villain and “final girl” trope, as well as an ending to ponder after the credits roll.

    Written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, ‘Heretic’ centers on a pair of young Mormon missionaries, Sisters Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Paxton (Chloe East), who knock on the door of the seemingly friendly English man Mr. Reed (Hugh Scholarship). He invites them to talk about religion and tells them that his wife is making blueberry pie. But alas, there’s no husband or cake: Reed takes them into his study to test their faith, explaining the iterations of organized religions through the ages (using everything from rock bands to the history of “Monopoly”) , and let them choose between doors marked “Faith” or “Disbelief” to leave.

    They choose “Faith,” but every door in this maze of terror leads to the same place: a basement dungeon where Reed reveals “the one true religion”: control over others. And in his case, it’s a host of women that Reed keeps in cages for his nefarious theological machinations.

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    Hugh Grant’s ‘heretical’ villain gets a violent comeuppance

    Grant says the most despicable aspect of Reed is: “He feels absolutely nothing for those girls or for the women in the cages.” The woman stands up and explains what she saw in the afterlife. Barnes knows it’s a trick and calls Reed out on it – and her throat is slit by him – while Paxton finds out. another woman was swapped after the first died (also, the ‘resurrected’ lady even says cryptically: ‘It’s not real.’)

    Finding her inner strength, Paxton fights back, stabbing Reed in the neck with a letter opener so she can escape. But when she goes back to check on Barnes, Reed stabs Paxton in the stomach. And for the scene where Reed crawls up to her and asks her to pray, Grant reveals that he filmed two different versions.

    In one of them he is the Mr. Reed of the whole movie: “He was kind of like, ‘Isn’t this fun?’ Look at us now! This is quite something. You got stabbed, I got stabbed. We’re going to die, and what’s going to happen? That’s nice,” says the actor. “Then I thought it might be interesting to see a very different side of him at the end of the movie, and him being absolutely terrified of dying.” The latest version includes the latter, “although it’s pretty hard to say he’s scared,” Grant says. “He is very scared. I lay my head on her shoulder and I sob a little, because with all his certainty that there is no God, he suddenly faces death and doubts his own doubts.

    Woods thinks Reed is just as afraid of that as everyone else. “Because the pursuit of finding out what the one true religion is is really the pursuit of comfort when we all die, right? It is to give us a medicine for the fear we have when we die. Is there anything else, or is that it? That’s a very scary idea. Reed has spent his entire life trying to essentially solve that puzzle. And in his final moments, that fear coming out of him and that desperation to connect with someone before it could all end, it just felt so honest to us.

    ‘heretical’ directors leave their endings to the public’s trust

    Before Reed delivers a fatal blow to Paxton, the presumed dead Barnes stands up and hits Reed in the side of the head with a board full of exposed nails. Barnes dies and Paxton escapes. Outside, she sees a butterfly land on her hand – a nod to a scene earlier in the film where Barnes mentions that she would like to be reincarnated as a butterfly – before it disappears. Or was it ever there?

    The filmmakers created a finale that left a lot to interpretation. Did Barnes actually come back to life to save Paxton? Is the butterfly only in Paxton’s head? Will Paxton survive? Perhaps she will succumb to her wound and see the butterfly in the afterlife.

    “We really wanted this film, ostensibly a two-hour conversation about religion, to translate into a conversation with the audience,” says Woods. “Our hope is that people will talk about it and test their theories.”

    Beck adds that when they started showing the film, some people loved the ending and found their own meanings, while others were unhappy with the ambiguity of the final moments. “It’s not there to give definitive answers,” says Beck. “It is there to provoke or remind people of the biggest questions we have as humans, and how we shape our existence.”

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