On Heretic's Ending

1 11月 2024

If you want a spoiler-free review on the 2024 movie directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, Heretic is a fun popcorn horror movie that uses Hugh Grant's talent well and incorporates some great editing and set design into a tightly written script. And from what I have read, the directors and actors did a good job of making sure they stayed as accurate as possible to the Church of Latter-day Saints.

That's all I have to say about its technical qualities.

The post will instead focus on the overall message and what the movie has to say about religion, so if you haven't seen it yet and don't like spoilers, don't read this article.

While there are many good comparisons to other movies when it comes to motifs and structures, Heretic is most like The Exorcist in terms of message. Both movies seem to question the premises of organized religion and faith, but in the end they are quite the believers. While The Exorcist uses horror to scare people back into religious communities, Heretic is the Protestant cousin: we know religion has a lot of baggage, but the notion of religious belief is still important.

The film pits two deeply unpopular factions in American society against each other: the Mormons and the atheists. The Mormon missionaries have the most character depth, sometimes subverting the audience's expectations of their deep faith. As for the Hugh Grant character's atheism, he is a rather confusing caricature: a religious studies dilettante looking for a true religion, and it turns out that the original religion is control. Iterations upon iterations have distorted this belief into salvation or something else. The buildup for the entire movie to reveal this is rather silly, almost as quaint as saying everything is political or power. Despite Grant's delightful performance, there is no sincere discussion of non-religious/atheistic beliefs, and he is merely a prop to test the symbolic meaning of belief in the film.

But despite the amount of harsh criticism of Mormonism, the movie takes its side. One of the Mormon missionaries, who's first presented as a naive and unquestioning believer, turns out to be someone who's been thinking about faith for a long time and brings up the efficacy of prayer experiments to Grant's character; she brings up how wonderful it is that even though it doesn't do anything, people still pray. The act is recognized as merely symbolic, but it is still necessary for an ethical way of life.

The horror is therefore not atheism but nihilism. It preaches a deeply religious message: it doesn't matter what you believe as long as you believe.

In a way, the film almost acknowledges critics like Friedrich Nietzsche and even co-opts their beliefs about illusion and life-affirmation. Like the mystery tricks in the second half of the movie, the movie is a clever sleight of hand to sneak in a very religious idea of what faith should look like in America.

That fascinated me because it felt like a microcosm of American society. It says it is not religious, but it thinks in religious terms. Atheism, secularism, and even the idea of religion are, after all, byproducts of Christian thinking. Despite an impressive sensitivity to non-Abrahamic religions, the film cannot imagine alternative arguments against nihilism without some vestige of religious belief.

And I'm not saying that this movie should somehow look for an atheist answer to satisfy me. For one thing, I'm a Taoist who follows my parents' Buddhist practices. I am not in conversation with the film's subject matter, which is deeply focused on the role of faith in America. My thoughts on religion are as non-sequiturs as Hugh Grant's monologues.

Rather, I find it remarkable that this movie wants to reform faith in order to present a more acceptable answer to "secular" America. The movie makes a formidable effort to investigate possible solutions, and all it has to say is that miracles can happen in a non-religious world. We just have to change the premises of religion to see them. There is no need for abolition, only reorientation.

There is no radical argument for a good life imagined outside the contours of faith. People who criticize Hugh Grant's character as incoherent are absolutely right, but they also miss the larger propaganda here: the role of faith is still there, and Americans do it every day without thinking. That's the power of faith and what it means to be an American, regardless of your religious affiliation or lack thereof. Indeed, it implies that the strength of American multiculturalism comes from its acceptance, which everyone believes. The nihilist Hugh Grant, who uses Judaism and other religions as talking points, doesn't believe, and that's why he has to be eliminated.

I do not find the message that faith needs to be reformed and reexamined for the sake of survival particularly compelling, but I can see the appeal. It affirms a philosophically religious way of life without the need for organized religion. Nihilism, on the other hand, is fundamentally un-American. Though cloaked in the language of rationality and science, it is ultimately unenlightened. Faith of any kind is the real source of enlightenment

And the movie does this very well. I enjoy the movie a lot because it knows its arguments well and hides them behind the spectacle of horror and mystery twists. The surprise -- believe! -- feels like a eureka moment after all the struggle. It's effective and well done.

I just don't care about the message. I'm interested in how people, especially religious studies scholars, will talk about it, but that's about it. It's not the kind of movie that makes me meditate on its themes, I'm just impressed by its rhetoric and its belief that it can reform faith. The movie isn't aimed at me.

The movie is still pretty fun, and I don't regret watching it. Hell, if a friend has it on their computer screen, I'll grab a cider and watch it. But it's not a movie that I'll remember for being incisive. It's just kind of fun, and provides a very interesting exercise in thinking about how the US ambivalence about religion is still on the positive side.

And I think that is why the title was chosen. If we take Hugh Grant's preaching very seriously, then everyone is a heretic who has strayed from the true religion of control. And the concept of heresy can only exist under the premises of religions. The message of faith that the movie has squeezed out after hours of theological rambling is a heretical and therefore religious one. It sees everyone in the movie theater as heretical, for better or worse, just like the characters in the movie. The diversity of heretical beliefs, as the film acknowledges early on, is not possible in our everyday language, but it's there, breathing and believing for a better tomorrow.

But for the rest of us who remain in the dark, all we can do is leave the theater and reflect on our alienation from the movie. Maybe one of us will write a long ass blog post dissecting the ideological underpinnings of the movie and revealing it to be religious in the end. But that alienation will never go away because they are not named in the movie.

They are not even nihilists. They are just not in the cast of symbolic characters who stand in multi-religious America. What do we even call such people?

I don't know. I wonder when we'll ever be part of the religious conversation that everyone always has at Thanksgiving. I just don't think it's going to happen anytime soon.