The new horror-thriller movie Heretic (2024) plays an ambitious game of religious debate while trying to keep viewers glued to the edges of their seats. The film has a simple premise: two Mormon missionaries, Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East) are out on a routine missionary drive to recruit new followers, and they happen upon the remote cottage home of one “Mr. Reed” (Hugh Grant) who lures the girls inside with the promise of serving his wife’s blueberry pie. Instead, Sisters Barnes and Paxton find they are a captive audience for Reed’s dark, deadly, debate about the value of faith.
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Throughout the cat-and-mouse game of Heretic (2024), there are several major questions that the audience is asked to wrestle with: Is the menacing air of Mr. Reed an actual threat? And is there something supernatural afoot? By the end of Heretic, those questions must both be answered…
RELATED: Heretic Review
Heretic Ending Explained (SPOILERS)
Early in the film, Mr. Reed claims that in his extensive theological studies, he happened to discover the one true religion. That claim is put to the test as Barnes and Paxton get locked in a dungeon with a supposed “prophet” of the true religion, where Barnes is “sacrificed” by Reed cutting her throat, to prove his new faith’s power of resurrection.
Does Mr. Reed Have Supernatural Powers?
Left alone, Sister Paxton discerns that no, Mr. Reed is not some priest of a dark new religion – he’s just a con man and a troll. In a final debate with Reed, Barnes reveals that she’s figured out his deception: the way he used two severely brainwashed and disheveled women to pull off the illusion of a “prophet” eating a poison pie, and then coming back from the dead. It’s all a ruse for Reed to cruelly make the point that believers in religion are gullible enough to believe a con that fits their faith – no matter how fantastical or impossible. Since Sister Paxton is smart enough to see through the deception, Reed invites her to go through a series of scary doors in his basement, and discover the ‘one true religion.’
Heretic: The One True Religion Explained
Sister Paxton braves the path through the basement doors, each one decorated in freaky-looking religious and/or occult memorabilia. When Paxton gets through the last door she finds herself in a storage room full of women in animal cages, being held prisoner – women who Reed starved and abused and brainwashed into his “prophets.”
Reed meets Paxton in this storage room and gives her a final quiz: After going the the progression of the evening, facing all the questions and challenges presented: What is the one true religion?
Paxton discerns the point behind the whole evening, and Mr. Reed’s entire pathos: the one true religion is control. Mr. Reed is nothing more than a mysogonist and psychopath serial killer, masquerading as an intellectual to sadistically toy with people’s faith.
Reed delights in the idea that he has manipulated Sister Paxton through every step the evening in order to bring her exactly to the point where he wanted her – either as another one of his slaves, or his latest kill. In his arrogance, Reed believes that Paxton is a people-pleasing sheep – which is why he never suspects that she is packing a ritual dagger that Barnes stole from his collections of religious artifacts. Paxton stabs Reed in the neck and makes a run for it.
Does God Intervene?
Reed eventually catches Paxton in the “prophet’s” dungeon and stabs her in the abdomen. Paxton goes down and as a dying Reed crawls up to finish her off, Paxton – despite all that’s happened – still chooses to close her eyes and begin praying.
Paxton’s prayers get answered in the form of Sister Barnes, thought dead after having her throat slashed, getting one last spark of life to get up and bash Reed, finishing him off. Barnes then dies in Paxton’s arms, before Paxton escapes the maze-like house and emerges into the new daylight after the snowstorm.
Did God intervene to save Sister Paxton? Heretic leaves that ambiguous for the viewer to interpret – and just maybe, wrestle with some of the doubts that Mr. Reed used to shake one’s faith.
Heretic is now playing in theaters.
