Category Archives: Thrillers

Heretic was not the film I expected. Judging by the trailers, I fully expected this would be a medium-rate slasher flick about two young Mormon missionary girls making their way through a killer’s deadly house.

And yes, there’s a creepy house. But Heretic is the farthest thing from medium-rate, and it doesn’t draw its suspense from jump scares or gore: it’s possibly the most cerebral thriller I’ve ever seen in wide release. It’s religiously-minded horror that, for once, actually takes religion as such with utter seriousness.

While serving a mission, Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East) stop by a lonely house, following up on a prospective convert’s expressed interest. They’re welcomed inside by Mr. Reed (a magnetic Hugh Grant), who wastes no time before engaging them in an apologetic debate over historical polygamy and the possibility of continuing revelation.

Sisters Barnes and Paxton soon learn that Reed isn’t all that interested in converting to Mormonism. Instead, he’s more concerned with converting them—to that which he cryptically describes as “the one true faith.” Their visit to his house is merely the start of a great game to be played throughout the labyrinthine structure—a game designed to radically revise their own beliefs.

Yes, this is a suspense movie. Yes, the girls are trying to escape the villain’s lair. There’s some gore—though it’s fleeting—and plenty of pervasive menace throughout. But in general, those squeamish about “horror movies” should consider giving Heretic a try. 

For one thing, Sisters Barnes and Paxton are never allowed to be the caricatures one anticipates. Early on, both girls—especially Paxton—come off as seriously naïve, with Paxton being positively overeager. Her dialogue is filled with clumsy substitutes for swearwords, and her attempts at apologetics are cringeworthy. Conversely, Barnes seems a bit more worldly, urbane—possibly on the verge of religious deconstruction herself. And yet both girls, when pushed to their limits, outdo themselves. Barnes reveals a deep faith of her own beneath her seemingly hardened, cynical exterior—and Paxton an unforeseen cleverness.

What truly sets Heretic apart, though, is the sheer length of time it allows its religious debates to unfold. These, not any onscreen violence or shock, are the real centerpieces of the film.

Reed is something of a syncretist, viewing all religious traditions as more-or-less derivative iterations of a primordial original. For Reed, surely the thematic similarities across diverse mythological and religious traditions—death, rebirth, baptism, miracles—render questionable any particular religion’s claim to be the one true faith. (This is, of course, James G. Frazer’s argument in The Golden Bough—but Hugh Grant is a bit more charming about delivering it.)

But surely there’s something beneath it all—isn’t there?

(Some spoilers follow)

It ultimately becomes clear that for Reed, religion everywhere and always is reducible to the brute fact of control. Reed’s stance isn’t quite New Atheism at its most overheated: it’s more like perennialism-turned-Foucauldian. Control surely exists, even if the divine as such does not, and control can be exerted by anyone rather than rationalized away in a haze of scientistic abstractions. To enter Reed’s house, becoming subject to his manipulations, is—for Reed—a model of all religious commitments.

Framed as it is onscreen, this claim presents a true challenge to traditional belief. Heretic, disappointingly, never really answers it. In the end, confronted with the full weight of Reed’s genealogical critique, Heretic’s “final girl” falls back on a sort of sociological agnosticism—conceding that even if prayer doesn’t actually work, it’s still a “nice thing to do.”

This is a sop to modern sentimentalism, a painfully missed opportunity to rebut Reed on his own turf. There are lots of ways to exert control, after all—but not all of them take on a common symbolic form. Smartphones are structures of control. The truly salient question is not why do these systems of control exist, but why have so many similar systems survived and converged, while others have failed? What if reality’s final truth is, in the end, baptism and death and resurrection? What if this is the deep insight that so many of the world’s great religions have asymptotically approached?

As thin as this conclusion might be, it doesn’t change the fact that Heretic is more than worth your time. This is the rare film about religion that actually feels like it was made by someone with more than a passing understanding of theology. And in the context of a thriller flick like this, that’s some of the highest praise I can give.

Bloodied bodies dangle from the roof of a roadside car wash. Bullets clatter off the stairwells of a suburban office park. The Lincoln Memorial erupts in a nova of flame. What bites deepest in Alex Garland’s Civil War isn’t its narrative, but its imagery—the transformation of heartland America into a nightmarish near-future war zone.

That might surprise audiences looking for a high-concept, #resistance action flick. The premise—contemporary America wracked by a second civil war—seems urgently political, even overtly partisan. But Civil War is not that movie. Indeed, it’s almost eerie how hazily its central conflict is described.

In one sense, Civil War is the precise inverse of The Purge. The premise of the latter franchise—every year, all crime becomes legal for twelve hours as a sort of societal blowoff valve—is brilliant and fascinating. But despite this hook, that series has never served up anything other than the most generic horror tropes. Civil War leaves its premise murky and underdefined, but leans hard into everything else.

Based on the trailers, you might’ve expected Civil War to be an action movie. It’s more like The Last of Uswithout zombies, a long road odyssey across a grisly-yet-strangely-beautiful apocalyptic America. Photojournalist Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) and colleague Joel (Wagner Moura) aim to snag a final interview with an embattled president (Nick Offerman) in Washington D.C., as forces from the Western Front—an ambiguously allied Texas/California coalition—close in. (The country is balkanized even beyond that, but the “Florida Alliance” is referenced merely in passing.) Aspiring photographer Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) and veteran journalist Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) tag along for the ride.

The beating heart of the film is the people and situations they encounter along the way—from trigger-happy war criminals dumping bodies into a mass grave, all the way to a beautiful West Virginian downtown trying hard to pretend the conflict isn’t happening. Their journey is slow, elegiac, brutal, but never once dull. The driving scenario is simply too compelling for that.

Thematically, Civil War is something of a Rorschach test. For the most part, it’s politically noncommittal (Offerman’s villainous President is in his “third term” and has a few Trumpian rhetorical tendencies, but that’s about it). One can easily interpret it as a story about mass violence as such, about political polarization, or even the brutal and fragmented nature of modern warfare.

But to my mind, the most interesting reading of Civil War is as a story about journalism. In recent years, the contemporary mass media has faced a generational conflict, between grizzled professionals committed to the old ideal of “objectivity” and a more socially-conscious younger set. Something reminiscent of this plays out onscreen, with all its associated moral tensions. Lee is hardened and stoic, capable of passively photographing a burning man in a gasoline-soaked tire, but it is clear that her work still takes an emotional toll. For her, journalism is not primarily about social change; it is about distance and discipline. On the other hand, Jessie begins in naïve optimism, passion, and emotional investment, but soon embraces an aggressiveness more like Lee’s. And ultimately, Civil War concludes this tale on a brutally ambiguous note: Jessie metamorphosing into her reluctant mentor, leaving open exactly what she may or may not be willing to do for the one perfect shot.

Hence, Garland suggests, a paradox. Effective work as a journalist requires critical distance from one’s subject matter, but the process of formation required to attain such detachment is, in essence, moral cauterization: to be really good at the job means to be something less than human (or maybe, better, “less than humane”). Something like such an act of self-renunciation makes sense in the context of soldiering: lethality requires, at some level, vilification of the foe. But that sacrifice is performed in service of a clearly defined end (service to one’s country). Can the goal of “sharing information for its own sake” ever justify such a “distancing” from moral concern? American journalism hasn’t yet figured out how to answer this question, and Garland doesn’t attempt to do it here. But it is a problem well worth posing.

In the end, Civil War isn’t really a mainstream film—it’s far closer to arthouse fare—and won’t be to every viewer’s taste. But those willing to fully commit to Garland’s haunting vision will encounter something increasingly rare, in an age of CGI spectacle: a waking nightmare that looks and feels all too real. And it may be the smartest film I’ve seen this year.