Debate Me: HERETIC

Most of the best horror movies of 2024 have been about religious young women endangered by men who want to control them. That’s a fitting reflection of our times in which women’s bodily autonomy is increasingly imperiled by men. Horror can be such a potent force for dredging up real societal fears, staring into the darkness of what is so often only implied by our poor information environment and what little passes for The Discourse these days. So after Immaculate and The First Omen, here’s Heretic, a sharp, pulpy movie about painful theological inquiry. It finds two sweet, innocent Mormon missionaries—The Book of Boba Fett’s Sophie Thatcher and The Fablemans’ Chloe East—knocking on the door of a potential convert (Hugh Grant). He chummily welcomes them in with assurances his wife is in the next room baking a pie. The movie’s somberly steady camerawork and ominous sound design proceed to sell an undertone of threat in his questions about their faith. Soon it’s clear there is no wife, and he doesn’t want to convert. He wants to debate. And he’s locked them in to do so. With that, writer-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (last seen making Adam Driver dodge dinosaurs in 65) have a screenplay that is smart about how disingenuous debate is really a ploy to trap someone and force an ideological point. It’s all about control.

The movie works its premise with a tight grip and a keen eye to its performances to see the slow-rolling twists, which are as much in the intellect as they are physical. Large portions of the movie are given over to a tense back-and-forth between Grant and the young women as he monologues about his studies in comparative religion and forces them to game out how best to reply in order to ensure their safety. As they descend deeper into the dark corners of his paradoxically labyrinthine little house—with locked doors and shadowy statues and strange noises—they’re led under duress to wrestle with issues of faith and doubt. His feigning doubts melt into stubborn certainties and then real dangers. It’s a neat little trick, as Grant modulates his usual sunny, stammering intellect ever so slightly into menacing mendacity, peppering them with questions and research. His scene partners travel a path from fluttery naivety to sturdy suspicion and then steely determination. It’s a fine genre exercise, with Beck and Woods making plain metaphors out of their right-on-the-surface plotting and intentionally arranged blocking and design. (By the time it becomes slightly more heightened in its finale, we’re ready for that release.) It finds charismatic villainy in a familiar type: one who’d use religious study to feel entitled to inflict cruelty. This makes for suspense in this circumstance, worrying for the victims whose lives, and souls, are on the line as they’re called to use their faith to find righteous strength, even, and especially, through their fears and doubts.

Jurassic World: 65

It may be a slow slog through a prehistoric jungle, but at least Adam Driver is there. The premise behind 65, named after how many millions of years in the past it’s set, finds a spaceship pilot crashing on Earth on the last day of the dinosaurs. He’s all set to off himself in despair until he realizes there’s one other survivor: a little girl (Ariana Greenblatt). Together they have to trudge across the wilderness, dodge a few dinosaurs, and get to the escape pod before the asteroid hits. Not a bad idea. In practice, the movie is sluggish and sparse, with a meager number of dino-related suspense moments and lots of slow-boil, largely dialogue-free, character interactions as the glum Driver and the girl—who don’t speak the same language—inevitably learn an ad hoc way to communicate and, wouldn’t you know it, care about each other. Driver is one of our finest actors, and though the movie gives him little to work with verbally or contextually, he’s able to use an expressive physicality that allows him to glower and smolder and sink into grief far more believable than what’s on the page. Imagine, say, a Tom Holland in the role, and I don’t know if it works as well. No offense to him.

It’s through Driver's performance—moving in a slow-motion, underwater sadness—that it becomes clear the movie is yet another modern genre effort that’s an extended metaphor for depression. His character is in a state of mourning for his home life—filled in with flashbacks—and in despair over his crashed fate. Only the glimmer of duty in protecting and caring for another person keeps him barely invested in staying alive and moving forward. No coincidence, then, that writer-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (cashing in on their big hit Quiet Place screenplay) have set the stage at the end of one era in our planet’s history and beginning of the next. By the time the movie arrives at its fiery conclusion, with asteroid pieces raining hellfire down on the prehistoric landscape as our characters make their last-minute attempt at escape, there’s something potent about the idea of a desperate climb out of one’s sadness—it’s either the end, or a new start. I just wished, for a movie about a spaceman trapped in dinosaur times, there were more use of that tension throughout. There are a few fleeting moments of effective creature feature skill—a tyrannosaurus rex ominously illuminated in the night by a lightening strike, a few jump scares with snarling teeth and looming claws—but the movie strangely underplays its own high concept. All the more accurate for its aims to make us feel Driver’s disappointment, I suppose.