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This article contains Heretic spoilers.
Hugh Grant is the ultimate pompous mansplainer in Heretic, an unusual philosophical horror from writer/directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods. Young Mormon women Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East) visit the home of Mr. Reed (Grant) who has expressed an interest in learning more about the religion. It’s a stormy day and Reed’s wife, he explains, is just inside the kitchen making a blueberry pie. So the women reluctantly enter the house to discuss the Book of Mormon. But all, of course, is not what it seems.
Reed’s theological bullying intensifies and the Sisters find the front door is locked—on a timer according to Reed. The only way out is through the back door, he says, and to get there they must climb down into a basement first where Reed’s mind games continue. Let’s break down his plan.
What Does Reed Really Want?
Ultimately: control. Reed is the absolute worst kind of intellectual, he has lured the women to his house to prove he can destroy the faith of the most devoted Mormons and exert full control over them. He wants to prove to them that God isn’t real, and that his intelligence can outdo their spirituality. Was he always intending to kill the girls?
Absolutely not, according to co-director Woods when we sat down to discuss the themes of the movie.
“Mr. Reed has spent his entire life investigating what is the one true religion,” the filmmaker tells us. “And over the course of his life, he has come to a hypothesis that he believes that the one true religion is control. So every religion is just really essentially men contriving a system to communicate their beliefs and operate and control how people live their lives and control how they think.”
Woods continues, “So he’s testing his hypothesis on this night, and there was a 98 percent chance on this night that the movie takes place on where he would have talked to these two missionaries and then would have sent them on their merry way. They basically would have had some awkward conversation in the living room, and then he would have said goodbye, they would have left. That was the most likely outcome of this evening. However, as the evening progresses, Reed finds himself intrigued and threatened by Sister Barnes. He thinks that she is quite the sparring partner and he is excited by her intelligence, and eventually that intelligence gets out of control and becomes dangerous for him. And so in order to maintain control, he has to cross a line.”
During the scene in question, Reed needles the women on their position on polygamy, positing that it was just Joseph Smith wanting to justify infidelity. But Barnes puts forward another point of view and won’t allow Reed to dominate her. She defies his sense of intellectual control, and so… the test goes another more insidious direction.
When Did Reed Remove the Bikes?
Mr. Reed’s decision to trap the women only occurring after that initial discussion would indicate that Reed didn’t move the bikes until Barnes passed (or failed?) his test. This doesn’t necessarily mean he planned to kill them at this point. It does mean, however, that he had decided to put the key to the bike lock in the pocket of Sister Paxton. Theoretically he could still have let them both go, but it would seem likely he was beginning to execute his plan, right down to intentionally putting the key to the bike lock back in the wrong back.
Woods describes it as a game of chess.
“Mr. Reed has in his experiments of control, and his hypothesis of ‘I can control somebody with ideologies and thoughts,’ would have kind of decision-treed out multiple outcomes for this evening,” says Woods. “Many, many different outcomes. And as the night progresses, he has to keep going back to ‘okay, so this happened, so I think they’ll do this if I do that. So I’m gonna go over here and do this thing.’ … It’s almost like a game to him, hence the model kind of house, it’s like a chessboard. And he’s constantly playing chess in his mind. He’s predicting what they’re going to do and what he’s going to do.”
Hence from the beginning, he is predicting Paxton will be the more malleable of the two—so much so, that he puts in her coat the key she will need long after Paxton is shuffled off the board.
Who Is the Prophet?
If, as per Woods, there were plenty of scenarios in which the sisters are left unharmed, it does make you wonder a bit about the women in Reed’s basement. Like if you’re literally just going to have a chat with the women, it does seem like an awful lot of trouble to go to to keep a starving harem of defeated women in cages poised to kill themselves at a moment’s notice. But we digress.
The prophet is another of Reed’s tricks. He wants to convince the sisters that they have witnessed a resurrection, that the prophet has returned from the dead and reported what the afterlife is like. The first woman eats the poisoned blueberry pie, presumably because she is so far under Reed’s control she will do as instructed. Then the second woman drops the body into the basement and replaces her. The problem is she goes off-script and Paxton catches this, positing that if she goes into the basement she expects to find a body.
Reed is perfectly happy with this outcome. In this scenario he knows she will walk through his rooms, discover the other women, and allow him to pop out and shout, “Hey presto! I knew you were going to do that!” Clearly the scheme is to make it seem like he is the ultimate controller.
The One True Religion
Reed has been studying all religious denominations for years so that he can smugly bully people into his way of thinking. He claims he was searching for the one true religion, but there is nothing spiritual about this man, who misses some of the fundamental emotional draws of faith. He has decided all major religions are just copies of each other (earlier illustrating his point using The Hollies’ “The Air That I Breathe” and Radiohead’s “Creep”).
In Reed’s final thesis, the one true religion is control, and he has exerted absolute control over the women in his basement, essentially making him a god. The trouble is, he wasn’t actually able to control Sister Barnes. She refuted his rhetoric, understood that it didn’t matter which door the women went through, and didn’t give in.
Sophie Thatcher, who plays Barnes, gave us her take on why she was such a threat to him.
“I think there’s possibly a threatening quality to her, because she is the first one to question him,” Thatcher says. “And I think maybe he’s not quite as used to that and is thrown off… Whereas I think earlier in the movie, Sister Paxton is trying to appease him a bit more. So I think there is a distinct rivalry between [Barnes and Reed], because Sister Barnes stamps her ground earlier on.”
Magic Underwear
This is the key word that the women have agreed upon, which would trigger Paxton into killing Reed, but after Paxton has been through the ordeal of trying to escape and failing she finds herself back in the basement with the dead Barnes. Or so we think. Out of leftfield, and on cue, Barnes pops up and kills Reed before dying herself. Has she been resurrected? Well actually no, but it’s a nice little punchline to believe for a moment that she’s risen from the dead.
Religion and Paxton
Though Paxton seemed to be the weaker and more pliant of the two women, she is no less strong than Barnes. After surviving the unbearable ordeal of Reed’s house, she still has her faith. Praying doesn’t work, she tells him, it makes no difference at all. But ultimately it’s nice to know that someone is thinking of you.
When Reed is dying therefore, she prays for him, even after everything he’s put her through. This compassion, this unending humanity, is how she manifests her faith and ultimately Reed has been unable to strip that from her. He has not won, he has not taken her faith, and he cannot control her. Though one of them is dead, these women have ultimately bested him.
Chloe East, who plays Sister Paxton, had a particularly interesting reading of the scene, as well.
“She prays for him at the end,” East says. “I think stuff like that is very admirable. I think she does have some sympathy or empathy towards him, which is crazy because I wouldn’t. But I’m inspired by it after seeing the movie. I think initially my instincts are when someone shows who they are, you run. You don’t pray for them.”
Still, East ultimately surmises that while Reed mistook Paxton’s naiveté for weakness or pliability, it was ultimately her strength to see through his limited attempts at control.
“I think even though he does switch she doesn’t always read into it being sinister,” East says. “I think she is more concerned about making the right moral choices and challenging him than seeing him as the satanic figure that needs to go away.”
The Butterfly
Paxton has said that when she dies she would like to come back as a butterfly and visit her loved ones in that form. After she escapes the basement she is visited by a butterfly—the spirit of Barnes perhaps—though the butterfly quickly disappears. Is Paxton believing what she wants to believe? An extension of her faith made manifest? A glimpse of hope which could also be interpreted as delusion? You decide.
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