Russell Stevenson’s guest review of the movie Heretic.
The Latter-day Saint missionary continues to inspire intrigue among the chattering classes. The horror genre sees a rich well of opportunity with the religiously devout. Devised as a challenge toward much of Victorian literature, which emphasized predictable social relationships, the application of standard rules of conduct and the sort. The “horror” genre (or, its predecessor in the form of Gothicism) sought to disrupt it—and it drew deeply on religion (with anti-Catholic sentiment driving much of it). The notion of religious zealots willing to do anything, say anything, believe anything in the service of an unknown and unknowable deity inspires fear in the religious of most flavors.
Mormon missionaries seem exude this kind of discipline, making them prime subjects for horrific analyses. Cast as disciplined and focused, with dedication to talk points and party lines, what would happen if these valiant, disciplined, and seemingly pleasant young folks were placed in a profoundly amoral situation? The picture-perfect image of epistemological certainty is more fiction than reality, as the film Heretic actively tries to demonstrate. Even the most staid of the religious likely has a heretic within—and it takes sociopaths and depravity to extract and develop them.
Many have read the reviews, but here’s the gist: Sisters Paxton and Barnes are serving a mission in a nondescript town. Early on, they show flickers and nuance of belief, in spite of their earnest self-convincing of their own commitment. Sister Paxton, in a pitch-perfect caricature of sing-songy cadence, comments casually on a pornographic film she watched with curiosity. Portrayed as ingenue, her casual (and slightly confused) discussion of pornography is equal parts silly and disturbing, almost like we were hearing a Quaker describe a gun battle or uncoordinated couch potato try to describe the intricacies of the Viennese waltz. She can barely pronounce the word “pornography.” But she says it, and then she says it again. Finally, Sister Paxton pivots away from the discussion, asking for Sister Barnes to confirm her own belief in the core principles of the faith. In a signature gesture, Sister Barnes, a steely, well-read, and witty convert from Philadelphia, stares into the distance, her eyelids flittering with a certain existential dread. What if she, or Sister Paxton, didn’t believe? No matter. Onward and upward. In viewing Heretic, we must never forget the title. This is not Taken, nor is it a “catch-me-if-you-can” film, though it draws on certain themes from both. It’s a film about a heretic. There is a person in this film who not only speaks heresy but is (or is becoming) a heretic.
The missionaries visit a house in the woods belonging to an elusive man, Mr. Reed, an unsettlingly quirky Hugh Grant. Mr. Reed put in a request for missionaries to come visit him. Mr. Reed is reasonably well-educated, atypically charming, and gregarious. He is also an obvious sociopath.
From the moment the sisters enter the home (with the assurance, of course, that his wife is home—this becomes a theme throughout the film), the weirdness gradually escalates. Initially, Mr. Reed’s seeming love of world religions is attractive to Sister Paxton. She stumbles eagerly through the basics of a discussion, trying earnestly to “get through the lesson.” She so badly wants a baptism. Mr. Reed, the gentle charmer of Notting Hill, smiles and dialogues. He plays it respectful, ever-emphasizing consent, engaging in dialogue, inviting critique. Do you want to learn this? Are you sure? Only go there if you do. For Book of Mormon readers, he fits none of the categories of the anti-Christ. Neither with the aggressive braggadocio of Korihor, the materialism of Nehor, or the corrupt establishmentarism of Zeezrom, or the religious fundamentalism of Sherem, Mr. Reed is too nice, too polite for these sorts. Aggressively atheist, yes—but please, he assures them, only do as you wish! You can check out any time you like.
[Beware: There are MAJOR SPOILERS below. You have been warned.]
Mr. Reed commences to introduce “icky” questions—with their permission, of course. What of Joseph Smith practicing polygamy (including with his teenage maid, Fanny Alger?). The conversation is about as historically sound as we might expect from a sociopath and largely unlettered missionaries: filled with overconfident soundbites. Mr. Reed doesn’t care about nuance, or accuracy–he cares about his new targets. Is it right? Is it wrong? Doesn’t matter. The more pressing question: does it destabilize the victim? That’s the goal. Discussions of plural marriage have a well-earned reputation for frightening and paralyzing even the steeliest of Saints, akin only to discussions of the priesthood and temple restrictions on peoples of African descent. Spiritual assassins do not need to be historians in order to take out their mark.
At first glance, it appears that Mr. Reed is The Heretic. Mr. Reed is a particularly sadistic Foucaultian circus-master, hoping—yearning—that his victims see the all-seeing eyes of power structures around them. Humans as nodes in a web of power relationships in this moral universe, and sad though it may be, the only way to expose them is through murder, religion’s final trump card He kills to teach: miracles are false! Resurrections are frauds! Can’t you see? Everything is about power, and he does not want to be the master of this great secret. Mr. Reed is not averse to control; he just wants to be the one who controls. As a good Foucaultian, he eventually shows his cards: power and control are the only values of the moral universe worth emulating. But he dare not show his cards, at least not at first. His students are not ready for full exposure to the bowels of human behavior. Sister Barnes, attuned as she is to the darker strains of human behavior, takes note of this: she was waiting for the moment when he would try to convince them that murdering them was their idea.
So, he plays his sadism respectfully, ever-emphasizing consent, engaging in dialogue, inviting critique. Do you want to learn this? Are you sure? Only go there if you do. It’s no fun to take his victims while still ignorant; in their final moments of truth, he wants them to acknowledge that power and control are all there is–and that he, and only he, is the one who holds it. In this there is truth. Acknowledge that we’re all in an endless cycle for control over each other filled with mind games, deception, and manipulation. I’ll kill you, or you’ll kill me; you control me, or I control you–and we’ll get the satisfaction of both of us acknowledging the truth of power and control. It’s an utterly horrifying, and underrepresented Foucaultian villain, and Grant played it exceptionally. Mr. Reed craves honesty. One of the few times that Mr. Reed loses his temper is after comparing the religions of the world to the iterations of a board game. Escalating in anger, he finally fumes that religious texts are “as hollow and as capitalistic as these ridiculous games.” Mr. Reed, as we learn, has no aversion to elaborate games intended to teach this One True Religion.
The big twist is that the almost comically naive Sister Paxton is the Heretic, not the more articulate, wittier, non-Utah born Sister Barnes who is offed early. Mr. Reed slashes her throat and disembowels her in a pool of blood—cheerily, even, with the hope of showing Sister Paxton that miracles are not real. The striking thing about the journey is that his dark spectacle appears to work. It does not take long for Sister Paxton to start echoing his talking points.
Sister Paxton had shown a tic or two of atypical faith at the outset, all under the guise of an almost cartoonish zest and earnestness so typical to American Mormondom: her willingness to share in cringe-inducing detail a deep review of some pornography (even mispronouncing it for added effect) she had seen and her musings about being reincarnated as a butterfly. When exposed to certain details about Joseph Smith’s practice of plural marriage, her response is intended to mirror our own rather than that of the more studied Sister Barnes: “seems kind of sketch.” While she’s no heretic (yet), the seeming bubbliness of her character conceals heterodoxy in the making.
Yet, Sister Paxton had not yet walked the Heretic’s path. She furrows her brow at discussion of comparative religion, all while the seasoned and agile Sister Barnes gamely spars on matters of theology. Sister Barnes is the able apologist, ready with all the standard talking points that Latter-day Saints have told themselves over the years. If they feel familiar, they’re intended to—at least for viewers among the Saints. She eagerly invokes all the known talking points of a primer on Latter-day Saint theology. Except for her occasional idiosyncrasy, she appears to be a believer.
Your rhetoric is thin, she charges Mr. Reed with a kind of moral righteousness. And not for nothing, too: his discussion of comparative religion lacked sophistication and reflects theories espoused by a minority fringe within scholarly circles. Mr. Reed, after all, was the one who was taking the dude “with the freaking bird head” a bit too seriously. He stages a death and a fake resurrection, akin to what many skeptics said of Jesus’s resurrection, hoping to fool the sister missionaries into thinking that they had witnessed a similar miracle. Sister Barnes outsmarts again, spotting and identifying flaws in his operation. Witty, he is—but to Sister Barnes, he’s nothing more than a cheap, fast-talking circus master. The sisters even stage a plot to stab him with a letter-opener.
No matter. For all of Sister Barnes’s zingers and clapbacks, for all of their planning and plotting, Mr. Reed’s flick of a box cutter brings her to her knees, a bloody mess. So is the end of the apologist, leaving the heretic-in-the-making alone to make their way to whatever awaits them. Sister Barnes’s intelligence means little here. Shorn of her defender companion, Sister Paxton embarks on a dark journey with Mr. Reed in search of what he calls the One, The True, even the Ancient Religion: The Religion of Control.
We might be reticent to acknowledge Sister Paxton’s transformation. Victimhood is not a color well-worn, and that’s no less so for Sister Paxton. Sister Paxton’s transition from orthodoxy to heresy, if intended to be the Great Value of the film, isn’t exactly an affirming story. It’s attuned to the genre: it’s horrific, and it deserves to be called horrific. Our natural inclination would be to affirm Sister Paxton’s independence. She does come into her own, but it is not through an assertion of her anything akin to Latter-day Saint tenets. She accepts Mr. Reed’s worldview—and it would be hard to resist. Look where intelligent repartee and challenge landed her compatriot Sister Barnes, whom Sister Paxton admired and looked to for spiritual guidance.
The final third of the film shows us Sister Paxton’s descent into Mr. Reed’s void. To call it grotesque is to white-wash it. Mr. Reed is the stuff of the darkest of true crime documentaries, as he cages and tortures women in substantial droves. Mr. Reed doesn’t mind that Sister Paxton has discovered his horrific secret: all the better to expose her to the realities of the Ancient Religion of Control.
By this point, Sister Paxton has lost the essence of conventional faith, but her compassion is piqued. Even while in the throes of her own trauma, she sees the suffering women, ministering to them in this, the most horrific of places.
At the height of the horror, both Mr. Reed and Sister Paxton have stabbed each other. They both lay bleeding and dying in an ill-lit room. There appears to be no God in this space. And Sister Paxton knows it. Mr. Reed cynically asks her to “pray for us.” By now, Sister Paxton has assumed a new posture. Gone is the nervous, overly-eager newbie missionary. This missionary is self-aware, cognizant, and deliberate.
The New Sister Paxton counters that “prayer doesn’t work.” The formerly eager missionary, ready to rattle off the missionary lessons with zeal, is now citing a scholarly study she had read. The only benefit of prayer is that it focuses the mind on other people. That’s it. Her prayer, by her own admission, is to a deity that she now knows does not exist. As a profession of faith, it pales in comparison to the gender-cidal hellscape to which she’s been exposed. This isn’t a story of eventual liberation from orthodoxy. She’s accepted Mr. Reed’s logic, and now, it’s nothing more than a battle for control—just as Mr. Reed wants it. And at this moment, Sister Paxton’s enduring faith in compassion rejects Mr. Reed’s Ancient Religion of Control. Make no mistake: she has now become an unqualified heretic. In the movie’s universe, this “heresy” is no fault but in fact, a revelation: “there is no god, but there are other humans—and I believe in them.” The story is profound in spite of itself, for two reasons: 1. Beware of slogans proclaiming enlightenment that, in fact, practice violent nihilism; 2. The only proper challenge to nihilism is compassionate connectedness; and 3. Apologia will not save you. Noted Latter-day Saint theologian Adam Miller has observed that the thesis of our lives is “about loving and caring all the way through, regardless of how things go,” which is “the only thing that can save us”—even in a dank, nihilistic prison with a sociopath. In this setting, apologia will not save you—but heresy might. Did Sister Paxton’s inaudible prayer save from her eventual demise? The filmmakers obviously don’t want us to know.
There is something wanting about the rejoinder the writers placed in the mouth of Sister Paxton. Her faith, moving and compassionate as it is, has reluctantly accepted the essentials of Mr. Reed’s worldview. The world is about control, and her choice is to give it up. If the most a person can say to a world of incarceration, torture, and abuse is “I’ll pray for you,” that’s not much of a moral takeaway. She has become the heretic, and she’s salvaging the remnants of whatever faith she once had. It’s a sympathetic position—and an entirely realistic one. Beware of slogans of enlightenment, the film seems to suggest (perhaps in spite of itself), lest it be violent nihilism behind closed doors.
Russell Stevenson is the author of For the Cause of Righteousness: A Global History of Blacks and Mormonism, 1830-2013, which received the 2015 Best Book Award from the Mormon History Association. He received a PhD in African Studies at Michigan State University.