Spoilers ahead for the plot and ending of Heretic . Mr. Reed has doubts.
Played by a delicious Hugh Grant, who gives what may well be one of his very best performances, Heretic ’s villain is an intellectual extremist bent on illustrating the hypocrisy and ills of faith and religion — at the expense of Sisters Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Paxton (Chloe East), two young Mormon missionaries who show up at his front door one stormy afternoon to sell him on the Church of the Latter-Day Saints. The terrible problem, of course, is that he doesn’t stop at just asking questions. Heretic is a luxuriously talky film, allocating vast run time to an orating Mr.
Reed as he ensnares the missionaries in what initially appears to be theological debate but is really his own cruel conversion effort. His intent is to break the women into submission by challenging their faith, studying the choices they make along the way. The movie’s true set pieces are the professorial villain’s ostentatious monologues using fast food, musical plagiarism, and Monopoly as metaphors to point out how modern religions are just conspicuous iterations of what’s come before.
To him, bringing that artifice into focus illuminates how the evolution of belief systems across history have come to obfuscate an ancient truth: that beneath it all, the one true religion is control. Frankly, this is a hard argument to dispute, but the guy is ultimately the movie’s monster, so his ideology has to be sufficiently chal.