One of my favorite songs is “My Sweet Annette” by the Drive-By Truckers. It tells the story of a working-class couple in the 1930s; the guy gets a job at the sawmill, buys his girl a ring, and they’re set to marry. But in an epic heel turn, he falls in love with the maid of honor, Marilee, and they run off together. Annette was left standing at the altar.
“Lord have mercy for what we’ve done,” Patterson Hood sings. “Lord have mercy when two people get alone.”
I love the song because it portrays a person’s vexed moral reasoning: it’s about someone who’s done something fundamentally horrible but has to live with it, and poor Annette is the titular character. Not Patterson or Marilee.
Why do I bring this up? I couldn’t stop thinking of it when watching the acclaimed 2024 film Heretic, directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods. I’m not a big horror movie fan, but I occasionally love the psychological or existential films like Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014). Babadook was basically a two-person stage play about grief, a woman, and her demonic son. (“Why can’t you just be normal?!?”). And Heretic is mostly dialogue; it could easily have been a play with three characters – if not for all the, uh, dungeons.
This film was pretty much tailored for me, because I’m a sicko. Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East star as Mormon missionaries (Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton) who visit the home of Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant) on their mission trip. They give the usual pablum about the Church of Latter Day Saints (LDS) and hope to be on their way, but he invites them in – the young women do some Terms of Service about how they can’t enter unless he has a female roommate present. Mr. Reed is like, oh, female roommate? Does my wife count?
The credulous women go in, and thus begins a small-scale personality struggle worthy of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. Obviously, any viewer is screaming at the screen, saying, “Run away! Run away! Get to the door while you still can!” But it’s like the movie Knocked Up – there wouldn’t be a story if people didn’t make mistakes.
Mr. Reed turns out to be quite a bit more knowledgeable about the LDS Church and other faith traditions than one would expect. He even whips out the Book of Mormon. Barnes and Paxton do their best to reiterate the dogma that their 20-year-old brains were trained to say, but Reed is up to a much more evil game – he treats them like a cat torturing a mouse.
Suffice to say, his “wife” does not turn up in any recognizable sense. Reed’s home almost becomes like the New York City of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours – an infinitely recursive maze of confusion and awfulness, a labyrinth worthy of a fucked-up Minotaur. How does this house have so many floors? Barnes and Paxton are drawn into Reed’s theological debates, and he poses them a choice: go through the Door of Belief or the Door of Disbelief – literally. You can imagine where this goes next. It’s like if Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris went insane on gas-station speed and created a torture amusement park.
I won’t belabor the rest of the plot, but Reed’s willingness to spar with the young women about Mormon theology and Joseph Smith was quite interesting to watch. I really don’t think I can recall a recent film that seriously engages with questions of faith and belief, even if Mr. Reed turns out to be an archon of almost Ayn Randian world-historical evil. There are these pure-hearted but naïve LDS missionaries and an absolute monster who’s created a dungeon world dedicated to what he calls “the one true religion.”
Heretic is actually scary, which is not something I say of many films, but it’s also a little bit funny, like Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018). It’s a lot of fun, despite its ghoulish, Saw-like contrivances. Hugh Grant, the former rom-com idol of Nine Months and Notting Hill, gives possibly one of the greatest performances I’ve ever seen as the tweedy armchair theologian and torture freak. It’s truly and completely remarkable. And Sophie Thatcher (also known for the terrific 2025 film Companion) seems like someone who is really going places.
The reason I brought up “My Sweet Annette” is that it raises a question of morality and faith. “Lord have mercy for what we’ve done… Lord have mercy when two people get alone” – in this case three, but I digress. What the fuck have we done to each other? What happens when three people are alone in the room, and nothing but power matters? Notably, I don’t think Mr. Reed ever really expresses sexual motivations – I kept expecting assault to come into the story, but he seems rather indifferent. He’s up to something else.
Still, the film puts to the test Fyodor Dostoevsky’s saying that “Without God, all things are permitted.” Sisters Barnes and Paxton have to see what that means when they’re faced with unspeakable evil, as others of faith have had to reckon with the insidiousness of Nazism, Pol Pot’s killing fields, or ISIS burying children live. Do you really believe? And why is it so important to believe?
I was not brought up especially religious, but I was a spiritual seeker in my youth. I’ve read a lot of the important texts like the Bhavagad Gita, Dhamapadda, and Christian apologetics like C.S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain, so I feel like I have some frame of reference for debates about faith and belief. Mr. Reed puts forward a gambit that authoritarian cruelty is superior in a world where there is no God — critically, if you can pull it off.
Unfortunately, people have also done insane and evil things in the name of whatever God they have for thousands of years, but this is more of a personal question — not whether you run a death camp for your ideology, but whether your own convictions about something timeless and irreplaceable can stand up in the face of utter inhumanity. Or maybe it’s simply what Patterson Hood said — Lord have mercy for what we’ve done. The ability to feel bad about something is pretty worthwhile even if you’re an asshole.