Bryan Woods

Heretic

31/10/24

Cineworld, Edinburgh

It’s Hallowe’en so it feels only natural to take in a creepy movie on this most auspicious of days. We’re reviewing some theatre tonight, so we decide to nip in to an afternoon showing of Heretic, which is having advance screenings prior to its full release tomorrow. The trailers have been promising (though, annoyingly, they show far too much of the actual film for my liking) and the idea of seeing Hugh Grant explore his darker side sounds like fun, so in we go.

Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East) are Mormon missionaries whose thankless daily ritual is to go out into the world to try and enlist converts to their faith. In early scenes we see them cycling around an unnamed backwater of America, being roundly ignored by everyone they approach – apart from some teenagers who pull down Sister Paxton’s skirt in order to catch a glimpse of her ‘magic underwear.’

Pretty soon, however, they arrive at the remote home of Mr Reed (Grant), who invites them in for a chat, assuring them that ‘his wife’ is on the property, so it will all be above board. His house is… unusual, and as it turns out, he’s rather well read on the subject of religion – indeed, he’s made a study of the world’s four main faiths and is more than happy to share what he’s learned. It isn’t long before he’s telling the two young women that the Book of Mormon is a sham, that all religions are essentially the same and that Radiohead’s Creep is a direct steal from The Hollies’ The Air That I Breathe.

He also has a riddle for them to solve – one that requires them to risk everything they believe in. And he assures them that they will witness a miracle…

It would be a crime to reveal more about this curious concoction, other than to say that writer/directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods create a dark sense of foreboding from the opening scenes onward and that Heretic’s early stretches become a sort of cod-philosophical discussion about the nature of belief. Religion, we are assured, is basically a construct created to exercise power over those who follow it.

The film is essentially a three-hander. (A back story featuring a church elder (Topher Grace) who is looking for the two young women is so brusquely handled that I can’t help feeling that some of it has been lost in the edit.) Grant meanwhile is having a whale of a time, playing up the erudite, hoity-toity malevolence to the max. Both Thatcher and East do an excellent job of portraying their respective characters’ mounting anxiety as they head deeper and deeper into the brown stuff.

It’s in the film’s last third that I start to have serious doubts about the whole enterprise. Once the full scale of the Reed residence is revealed, the logical part of my brain can’t stop wondering about the impossibility of a lone man keeping such a complicated establishment in running order. I mean, what are the maintenance costs? Why has he created such a complex labyrinth in the first place? And how has he managed to do it without anybody noticing?

The final twist seems to want to have its cake and eat it – are we seeing something that’s actually happening or is just a twisted vision in the head of one of the characters? Well, that will ultimately depend on your own beliefs, I suppose. I’ve been suitably entertained by what I’ve witnessed onscreen, but I’m left with the conviction that Heretic isn’t anywhere near as clever as its creators would like to think it is. But on the other hand, I haven’t seen anything else quite like it.

Happy Hallowe’en!

3.4 stars

Philip Caveney

65

11/03/23

Cineworld, Edinburgh

It was clear before 65 even arrived that something was amiss with this project. Two planned release dates were swiftly abandoned, as though the project were seeking a landing at a time when not much else was happening cinema-wise. On paper, the premise sounds good. Adam Driver versus dinosaurs? What could possibly go wrong?

From the get-go, 65 requires viewers to accept a pretty unlikely set-up – that somewhere in the universe, sixty-five million years ago, a planet existed where the inhabits looked human, acted human and some of them even spoke perfect English. This is by no means a spoiler, it’s spelled out in text in the film’s opening moments. Mills (Driver) is a spaceship pilot, who has recently been charged with the task of heading up a two-year mission (we’re never given any of the details of what he’s expected to achieve out there). He’s agreed to leave his – everyday sexism alert! – un-named wife (Nika King) and his daughter, Nevine (Chloe Coleman), back on his home planet because the latter is suffering from an unspecified illness and Mills will now be earning triple his usual wages, which will no doubt pay for all those pesky hospital bills.

A year or so later, he’s travelling through space in a ship that’s also carrying a group of anonymous passengers in suspended animation (again we’re not trusted with an explanation for this), when a sudden meteor strike sends the ship hurtling towards an unknown planet. Mills survives the subsequent crash, along with a nine-year-old girl, Koa (Ariana Greenblatt). Now the two of them must somehow make their way to the ship’s escape pod, which is inconveniently stranded on top of a mountain.

The planet? It’s Earth. And it’s heavily populated by dinosaurs…

The term ‘stripped-back’ has never felt more appropriate – and, while the set-up strains credulity, it’s simply and effectively done. But once Mills and Koa are installed on this hostile planet, the film has nothing left but a series of frantic chases as our two heroes are pursued hither and thither by a bunch of scaly co-stars with no higher ambition than to eat their visitors. While the film looks great (the scenes shot in the Florida Everglades are particularly eye-catching), the inevitable result is monotony.

Attempts to vary things up are mostly centred around Mill’s recorded memories of his daughter – though, curiously there are none of his wife. (Did they fall out? We don’t know!) I am asked to suspend my disbelief every time a miraculous event saves Mills and Koa, allowing them to escape apparently certain death by a hair’s breadth. Written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who created the superior A Quiet Place, I can’t help feeling that at some point there must have been a lot more information built into this film, cut out piece-by-piece after successive test screenings, perhaps. This may account for the finished movie’s relatively lean running time, and I suspect that, somewhere in the archives, there’s a director’s cut, which features a lot more information than we’re offered here.

It’s by no means a terrible film. The dinosaurs are decently rendered in CGI and I’m genuinely excited by the first attack – but, by the seventh or eighth, I find myself looking at my watch, wondering when I’ll be able to achieve escape velocity.

2. 8 stars

Philip Caveney