The Pie is a Lie — Heretic

William J Hammon
9 min readDec 22, 2024

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Believe it or not, I’m almost all caught up on my review backlog. After this one, which is admittedly six weeks late (I know, I know, I suck), all that remain are the three November tentpole releases and I’m basically current. This is largely because everything I’ve seen in December up until the last 48 hours is under the Animation/Documentary/International Feature umbrella, and those will be handled in due course via batch review posts. So let’s go into overdrive to finally bring ourselves up to date.

There are myriad reasons for someone like me to love Heretic, which could have a massive throwdown with Longlegs for the title of “Best Horror Movie of 2024,” and not just because, like that other triumph, it features an all-timer performance from a great actor and it holds a mirror up to religion. It’s because, in the tradition of some of the greatest genre entries of all time, the story is grounded in reality (something organized religion can often have a HUGE problem with) and directly confronts the persecution complex that many churches use as a weapon against everything from politics to progress to politeness. I know this review is massively late, but it is somewhat appropriate to go over this at the time of year where its themes are particularly relevant, especially if you’ve ever said “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” to someone in any store outside a major metropolitan area.

And let’s be clear right from the off. While I have my own biases when it comes to the institution of religion — something I’ve been open about for my entire adult life — I don’t just like this film because it’s a chance to dunk on faith. I’m all for people having their own beliefs, even if I personally find them absurd and risible. A large part of the fun of this movie is about how easy it can be to set up a death trap to ensnare gullible people, and it’s undeniable that several sects and denominations thrive on that very suggestibility, so it makes for a satisfying narrative alignment. The only area where my individual opinions enter into the equation is in the particular chapter our targets belong to, and that’s only because I’ve had a lot of dealings with them over the years.

The town where I moved for high school (and lived with my mom until a couple years after college) is about 10 miles away from where the Latter Day Saints church was founded. I’ve been to Joseph Smith’s farm. I’ve attended the Hill Cumorah Pageant, which was an annual celebration at the site which drew tens of thousands of Mormons from all over the world, sort of like a pilgrimage until it ended in 2019 (it was a massive pantomime depicting the events of the Book of Mormon, with Donny Osmond playing Jesus one time; it was weird). When I took my ex-girlfriend home to meet the family, I took her to the Visitors’ Center because a) she loves museums, and b) being that she was part indigenous, I knew it would be funny when she revealed that fact, seeing as part of the church’s teachings is the idea that natives were cursed with red skin as punishment from God; the look on the guide’s face was priceless.

And of course, I’ve dealt with missionaries, many, many, MANY of them. Between Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, I don’t think a month went by in my childhood without someone knocking on our door and asking me where I thought my soul would end up if I died the next day (my answer is always a bus station in New Jersey). I don’t hold it against the missionaries themselves, because most of them are just young adults and teenagers (despite the “Elder” title for the boys) raised in this system and under this hierarchy, and deep down they’re still decent people. It doesn’t stop me from cracking the odd joke at the nonsense they’re selling, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve just taken to being secularly encouraging. When I flew home after my mother’s funeral last year, a “Sister” sat next to me on the plane, and even without her nametag I would have recognized her. I simply asked her how her mission was going as a means of making pleasant conversation, and when we landed I wished her well by suggesting that she give herself permission to have fun.

Suffice to say, life experience informs my level of schadenfreude entertainment while watching Heretic, but only to a degree. Our two heroines, Sisters Barnes and Paxton (Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East, respectively) could come from any church, even a completely made up one (they’re all made up, but you get my point), but my history with Mormons does add an extra iota of verisimilitude to the affair.

Anyway, to the story. Barnes and Paxton are on their mission, visiting strangers, discussing the church, and handing out pamphlets in a fairly well-trained routine. The major difference between them is that Barnes is a bit more blunt, pragmatic, and assertive, while Paxton is timid and passive, her embarrassment at the mention of the “magic underwear” being a running gag that turns into something of a deus ex machina later on. While making no headway with the random people they encounter, the girls go to a scheduled meeting at a secluded house on a hill. There awaits Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant), who had requested a visit, ostensibly out of theological curiosity. The girls are initially hesitant to enter, as their rules state that they can’t be alone with a man, but Reed assures them that his wife inside baking a blueberry pie. With their bikes locked at the property’s entrance, and with a cold, snowy evening beginning to set in, they cast the instant red flag aside and go in.

Anyone who’s ever seen a movie before knows this is a bad idea, and Reed’s inescapable escape room starts revealing itself. The doors are locked. There’s a mobile signal jammer. The aroma of the pie is shown to be a scented candle. Clearly there is no wife here, and clearly Reed’s motives are diabolical in nature. Yet he continues to maintain the ruse of well-intended philosophical debate, luring Barnes and Paxton into his cellar with assurances that they can leave at any time, which of course is a lie.

What follows is a very intriguing bit of fuckery and mind games from Reed. He makes a case that all religion is essentially branding and marketing, with every tradition coopting and adapting whichever elements from one another are convenient to sell the message, which is control and a surrendering of free will in the guise of salvation. In extremely clever fashion, he uses the history of the “Monopoly” board game (including its original form as “The Landlord’s Game”) and the chord progressions of the song, “The Air That I Breathe” being used for Radiohead’s “Creep” and later Lana Del Rey’s “Get Free.”

It’s a really interesting tactic, mostly because it’s an intentionally simplistic argument that invites rebuttal as a form of bait for the victims, bait which Barnes takes. Reed is essentially asking the girls to justify their faith when confronted with basic history that disproves their narrative, but beyond that he’s daring them to see themselves as innocents when they belong to an institution that directly engages in this rapacious practice. When he argues that the “original” monotheistic religion, Judaism, isn’t the majority faith because it wasn’t “flashy” (the comparison between “The Landlord’s Game” and “Monopoly”), Barnes counters by bringing up the Holocaust, but that plays into Reed’s hands and actually affirms his assertion. The Holocaust happened, at least in part, because Hitler and his ilk were able to use propaganda to denigrate Jews and eventually call for their extinction. It’s still, at its core, a branding exercise, just a very extreme one.

The, let’s call it “exchange of ideas” culminates in Reed giving the girls a choice. There are two doors behind him leading out of the cellar. He labels one as “Belief” and the other as “Disbelief,” saying that one will lead them out of his house while the other will lead them further down into the depths, a sort of test to see if he’s gotten through to them. Of course, both doors lead to the same dungeon area, one that does technically have a path out of the house, so he’s not, strictly speaking, lying to them, but the message is clear. No matter what you do, the result is the same. Their choices led them to this moment, but those choices were also in service to something that can never be proven as real, and either way, as he posits, they’re deciding to trust someone (either himself or God) who has given no verifiable reason to trust them, reinforcing the catch-22 dilemma that Reed uses as the foundation for his entire diatribe. The final pieces of the chessboard are placed with the arrival of “The Prophet” (Elle Young), a woman dying in that very room who Reed says will resurrect as proof that he has found “the one true faith.”

A lot of this is silly and self-serving, but there is a cold logic to it all as well. Between the performances of Thatcher and East, there’s an appropriate straddling of the line between believability and pure insanity, their wardrobes (Paxton wears light, bright colors while Barnes is mostly clad in black) allowing them to be the proverbial angel and devil on the viewer’s shoulders as they sort out all the rhetoric. Add in Grant giving his finest performance this side of Four Weddings and a Funeral and you have a really powerful triad dynamic with our leads. Each of them has something of value to say in this messed up scenario, and while Reed gets to chew the scenery as our main baddie, there’s plenty of sound reason to go around.

Ultimately, Reed’s goal is to ask what the point of all of this is while trying to convince the girls that everything is pointless, embracing nihilism over what could just be easily dismissed as evil. That’s why this is so fun. With one hand the film indicts religion (in one of the more hilarious moments, the “Elder” supervising the girls, played by Topher Grace, arrives at the house looking for them, but he can’t hear them screaming from the basement, so he leaves, but not before giving Reed another pamphlet, because recruitment is his only true intent), but with the other it offers reasons why faith has a purpose, and could even be interpreted a societal need.

This is a story that thrives in its own contradictions, because despite what some institutions might preach, there are no easy answers. Uncertainty has to exist, doubt has to be acknowledged, and reality has to be reconciled for any of this stuff to make sense, and that’s where we get our more sinister thrills. The reveal of the trap is almost giddy in its simplicity, but the real enjoyment comes in watching these characters come to their own terms about their place in the universe, whether it be as a passing bit of dust in the wind or as a special being guided by a supernatural plan. In a weird way, the only unsatisfying part is the ending because it appears to answer definitively a question that was better served to not have one.

This is a fantastic bit of genre that challenges the viewer without pandering or patronizing. If there’s any real moral to be had, it’s probably that no matter what your beliefs are, it might just be best to keep them to yourselves and leave well enough alone. Because again, no matter what divine motivation the girls may have had, they chose to put themselves in mortal peril. Yes, in a bit of a conceit, Reed invited them, but in the end, they could have just decided not to knock on the door. While the vast majority of us who answer it aren’t sadistic killers, do they really not know what they’re getting into?

Grade: A-

Join the conversation in the comments below! What film should I review next? Do you engage in religious arguments? Just for the sake of curiosity, which door would you have chosen? Let me know! And remember, you can follow me on Twitter (fuck “X”) and subscribe to my YouTube channel for even more content, and check out the entire BTRP Media Network at btrpmedia.com!

Originally published at http://actuallypaid.com on December 22, 2024.

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William J Hammon
William J Hammon

Written by William J Hammon

All content is from the blog, “I Actually Paid to See This,” available at actuallypaid.com

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