Fleapit revisited:Heretic.

"I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo. What the hell am I doing here? I don't belong here" - Creep, Radiohead

In Radiohead's Creep, the young Thom Yorke thinks he's a creep and a weirdo because he feels insecure around the object of his affection and thinks people are laughing at him. In Scott Beck and Bryan Woods' new film Heretic, Hugh Grant's Mr Reed doesn't think he's a creep and a weirdo. He IS a creep and a weirdo and anyone unfortunate enough to find themselves in his company would certainly be wondering what the hell they're doing there.

When two Mormon missionaries, Sister Paxton (Chloe East) and Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher - who also contributes a version of Bob Dylan's Knockin' On Heaven's Door to the soundtrack), knock on Mr Reed's door for a chat about the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints they get more than they bargained for. Pseudo-intellectual Mr Reed decides to take mansplaining to an Olympic level by setting the sisters a series of trick questions that seem designed to take them out of their comfort zones and give him some kind of sense of superiority.

 

His house is festooned with floral wallpaper, there are scented candles and more doors than a Dorothea Tanning retrospective - including the ones that Bob Dylan might knock on, and to describe the plumbing as rudimentary would be generous. Splitting the difference between a straight horror (there are power cuts, jump scares - that don't quite come off, and even the 'final girl' trope of horror lore) and a psychological thriller, the film takes the viewer on a journey from room to room and from moral quandary to moral quandary.

It's full of philosophical and theosophical debating points which are clever but never quite as clever as the film makers', and Mr Reed, seem to think they are (there's even an explanation of the history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam which comes across as a Dummy's Guide to the Abrahamic Faiths). It's an interesting and original story but it's not quite as groundbreaking as you feel it would like to be and it's not a scary as it ought to be either.

It's good but it's not brilliant but I have to give credit to any horror film that manages to reference Lana Del Rey, Jar Jar Binks, Monopoly, magic underwear, The Hollies, and somebody so innocent they call pornography 'pornonography'. What could come across as anti-atheist propaganda ultimately ends up in the same place most religion does - in a bloodbath. It's more fun than most religious bloodbaths but, as with Mr Reed's sophisticated sophistry, it feels like a film that, though highly watchable, falls just short of fulfilling its potential.