By Bob Grimm

Hugh Grant delivers a career-best performance—against type—in Heretic, a thought-provoking and beautifully intense horror film from the writing/directing pair of Scott Beck and Bryan Woods.

Two young women (Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East) are out on a potentially stormy day trying to spread the word of the Mormon religion. They wind up at the house of a kindly countryside gentleman who invites them in for a theological discussion and pie.

It turns out the gentleman isn’t as kindly as he appears (but he always, sometimes disconcertingly, remains very polite), and the girls find themselves in a sort of intellectual showdown with potentially horrifying results.

The cat-and-mouse game is done extremely well, in part because the intentions of Grant’s character are not clear. The mystery remains difficult to solve until the very end, and the ending will be the subject of many post-movie conversations.

Thatcher and East are very good as two heavily religious young women who must question their own faith in order to survive. Both deliver very moving performances.

Grant gets to use his cinematic charms in a way that turns his winning grin into something evil. He’s played villainous roles before, but this is an altogether different spin on a villain for him. He is—in a word often used in the film—a real creep. In a year when many horror films deserve Oscar buzz, Grant is another performer who deserves serious consideration for work done within the genre.

This is the sort of film that will have you arguing with movie pals long after, in a good way. Heretic is up there with Smile 2, The Substance, Longlegs and other 2024 horror offerings that show the genre delivering both good frights and unexpected intellectual stimulation.