Heretic is a 2024 psychological horror written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, the duo behind the screenplay for A Quiet Place, distributed by A24 and running 111 minutes. It stars Hugh Grant as Mr. Reed, with Sophie Thatcher as Sister Barnes and Chloe East as Sister Paxton, two young Mormon missionaries who call at the home of a man who has expressed an interest in learning about their church. Topher Grace appears as Elder Kennedy. It premiered at Toronto in September 2024, was made for ten million dollars and went on to take around sixty million worldwide, and it took Beck and Woods roughly a decade to get it made.

That is genuinely all the plot I am prepared to give you, because this film does a number of clever and satisfying things and I have no intention of removing any of them.

What I will say is that I came out of it struggling to articulate why I had enjoyed it so much, and working through that has been the interesting part.

The obvious starting point is Hugh Grant, who plays an absolute lunatic and is having the time of his life doing it. It is a genuinely gleeful performance, the sort of thing an actor only gets to do when they have earned enough goodwill to be trusted with it, and it earned him a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor, which is a rare thing indeed for a horror villain. One critic wrote that his daffy, amused portrayal might be enough to make a convert of you, and having watched it, that is a very funny and very accurate line. He is also, and this is central to why it works, extremely funny. The film has a genuine sense of humour running underneath it, which keeps it from ever becoming oppressive.

The element I kept circling, though, was how startlingly good this looks for such a contained production. It is essentially a single house, and yet it never once feels cheap or stagey. I could not work out why it felt so expensive, so I went looking.

The answer is that they simply hired heavyweights. The cinematographer is Chung Chung-hoon, whose credits include Oldboy, Stoker, It and Last Night in Soho. The production designer is Philip Messina, who designed the Hunger Games films, the Ocean's trilogy and Ford v Ferrari. That is a ten million dollar single-location horror staffed at blockbuster level, and every dollar of that decision is visible on screen.

It also explains why the geography of the house works as well as it does. The layout is legible and deliberate, the film uses its space with real intent, and there are details scattered through the production design that reward you for paying attention. Some of the signposting is admittedly a little obvious, and I clocked a few things earlier than I suspect I was meant to, but it was consistently a pleasure to sit there scanning the frame for what had been left for me.