Heretic review: even Hugh Grant can't save this horror hokum

The Brits are coming, again! That’s the Oscar buzz according to some of the (British) press backing three Englishmen of a certain age to land a nod from the Academy.

Ralph Fiennes, 61, probably will win best actor for Conclave. Daniel Craig,56, ought to bag a nomination for his superbly off-character performance in Queer. And then there’s Hugh Grant, 64, on the presictions list for playing against type in this horror hokum…

Well, I’ll boil my hat in witch’s blood and eat it if Grant ends up on the shortlist. Grant, to be fair, isn’t bad, but a film as unscary and frankly as tedious as this should never get a whiff of one of those golden statuettes.

Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East play two young Mormons spreading the faith door-to-door somewhere in North America. When they approach the spooky house in the woods, the door opens to reveal Grant within. Does he put on an American accent? No, it’s a familiar “Helloooo…” as he greats them in his chirpy, never-changing Four Weddings/Bridget Jones brogue.

And as the latch clicks behind the women and Grant’s Mr Reed informs them (telegraphing oh-so-obviously to the audience) their phones won’t work because of metal in the house’s walls and roof, we know we are entering the hackneyed horror realm of male psycho inflicting gleeful torture and terror upon pretty girls.

It's a cat and mouse game, with Mr Reed as the dominant, smugly grinning feline. The supposedly “clever” take here, which “some” people will indeed enjoy, is Mr Reed’s smart-ass takedown of Mormonism and all forms of religion, a narrative device which leads to the eventual grand (but sorely underwhelming) pay-off.

Besides Grant being a bit too cheerily himself, the religion-bashing is like being cornered by a pub bore armed with a stack of Wikipedia pages. There’s a slightly amusing comparison of different religions to varying iterations of the Monopoly board game, but by this point Mr Reed’s tedious nattering had rendered my capacity for humour stone dead.

More zeitgeisty pop culture references are mined in yet another lecture about how Lana Del Rey plagiarised Radiohead, who in turn had actually (dontcha know) been influenced by The Hollies for their song Creep. Basic Wikipedia stuff, again. It gives Grant the opportunity to open his vocal cords and get his Radiohead head on, but I wasn’t in a laughing mood by now.

Grant is actually pretty decent but it’s a shame he seems to have been asked to simply be “Hugh Grant” for most of the story. He’s constantly doing the usual pulling his cheeks back to stretch his mouth while twinkling his eyes (try it, it’s fun, you’ll feel just like Grant yourself). In the end, he does stop quipping and gets his evil grimace on for the big reveal.

However, an actor can only work with the material and direction they are given, and here’s a clue to the quality on offer in Heretic. Directors Bryan Woods and Scott Beck wrote the highly acclaimed A Quiet Place, but that’s their zenith – their joint output behind the camera includes the recent Adam Driver dinosaur nonsense 65, and the even-more-forgettable trio of Nightlight, Spread and The Bride Wore Blood.

Could Grant have performed as well as Fiennes or Craig in their aforementioned roles and had a serious tilt at Academy gold? I can’t quite see it. But I can confidently predict this faux-intelligent twaddle isn’t going to get him anywhere near that podium.

Heretic is in cinemas from November 1