I think there are a couple of different ways we can think about horror films. One is the idea of horror as anything that evokes a particular mood or feeling in the audience, and the other is the idea of horror as films that hew to specific topics and employ specific plots and clichés. I’m a much bigger fan of the former than the latter, insofar as it brings a wider variety of films into the tent, and insofar as the latter tends to run to the formulaic, to product that faithfully meets preconceived expectations, but doesn’t really move people beyond some cheap thrill. The latter is far more profitable than the former, for sure, because I think a healthy chunk of people like to indulge a basic startle response without facing anything that genuinely haunts them or makes them feel uncomfortable. These are the kind of people who think “decadence” is a dessert that features five kinds of chocolate.
Why am I even going on about this? Well, it’s because The Heretics isn’t an especially good or interesting film, but it is one that is so transparent and obvious in its moving parts that I had the whole thing more or less figured out within the first ten minutes. This is not a film in any danger of overestimating the viewer’s intelligence.
We open on a ritual in the middle of the woods. A young girl is chained to an altar, surrounded by robed and masked figures. She struggles, they chant. They raise their knives, she struggles. They chant, and chant, and cut…their own throats.
The young girl is Gloria, and she grows up to be reunited with her mother. Gloria goes to a support group for abuse survivors, and it was at this group that she met her partner, Joan. And so Gloria and Joan go to group, after which they volunteer at a shelter run by the church where their support group is held, and afterward, they lie in bed together, talking about what they’ve been through, and Joan said she’d go through all of it again, because it lead her to Gloria. Which, if you stop to think about it, is kind of creepy and manipulative. Never mind that, though. Gloria says her goodnights, and starts heading for home…when she is abducted by a man in an RV, who starts driving her far out of town.
It seems the cult isn’t done with Gloria just yet.
Right off the bat, Joan is way, way too intense - during the support group scene (one where the counselor pressures Gloria to share her story, which is…a pretty big no-no, I think?), Joan advocates that another woman in the group torture her abusive husband, which is just…yikes. Joan almost stabs a guy at the shelter when he surprises her, and it doesn’t read like an exaggerated startle response, it reads like someone looking for an excuse. As it does when she’s taking fliers door-to-door after Gloria goes missing and decides to handle a refusal to look at the flier by holding a knife to the person’s throat. And then, when a police officer asks her about it (because that is a thing that will happen when you hold a knife to somebody’s throat and they get a good long look at you), she stabs the cop to death in front of Gloria’s mother. And then she stabs Gloria’s mother to death
Mind you, this is all well before the reveal that she’s a cultist. So when that reveal comes, all of the stabbing, plus her inordinate interest in the fate of a necklace she gave Gloria to “protect” her, plus her insistence that her and Gloria meeting was destiny, well, that reveal has absolutely no impact at all because it was clear from minutes into the movie that there was something very, very off with Joan.
Likewise, Thomas is revealed to be nonthreatening pretty much immediately. He’s gentle, shy, soft-spoken, and sympathetic. He also serves as an exposition engine, explaining to Gloria in great detail exactly who he is, why he left the cult (he was never really one of them, and watching them kidnap Gloria was the final straw, apparently), what the cult’s purpose was that night, and what’s happening to Gloria is that she’s undergoing physical changes because she’s a host for the demon Abaddon, which is why she’s experiencing fevers and chills and hallucinations and weird skin stuff and puking. He tells her this almost immediately - well, no, not immediately, he tells her what the purpose of the ritual was, but tries to claim that it was all superstitious nonsense right up to the point that he finally comes clean, and it all feels like the filmmakers stalling for time, rather than any natural denial or reluctance on Thomas’ part.
And this is the really exasperating thing - the pieces are there. Scary - looking dude kidnaps young woman who has kind of freaky nightmares, worried mother and girlfriend try to find her, maybe punctuating acts and story beats with Gloria’s weird nightmares until it’s revealed at the end that the cult sacrificed themselves. Joan’s real identity is revealed in a moment of betrayal, too late for Thomas to do anything as the reason for Gloria’s rapid decline becomes clear...it could have been good. Maybe not, like, Hereditary-level good, but good nonetheless. But instead, the filmmakers give away every secret they have at the first opportunity in the most obvious way possible. I finished actors’ lines for them more than once over the course of this film, that is how formulaic all of this is. Every seam shows.
And it’s all abetted by an execution that, although better than amateurish, never rises to the level of anything better than dull competence. The dialogue trades entirely in clichés, the acting is either wooden or histrionic, and none of it believable as human behavior. In terms of structure, there’s no real pacing or dynamism, just the necessary story beats, presented in sequence without any sense that one set of events arises organically from another. Even the music is too obvious, all echoing booms and shrieking strings regardless of the scene.
And because the events of the film are too immediately obvious to really be considered revelations, there’s no mystery or power to it. It isn’t scary. Things just sort of happen, punctuated by stock jump-scare and nightmare sequences arranged like they were taken from a kit (including one entirely gratuitous scene where Gloria attempts to seduce Thomas), one stupid choice after another, everything dragged out past the point of believability. All of this in service of a climax where Abaddon is indeed summoned (and apparently the Angel of Destruction is a skinny white dude in some unconvincing horn prosthetics), and even that is a problem, because stories like this work best when you never see the demon, when there’s no opportunity for rescue or hope, when the conspiracy has done its work and it’s too late, like in Hereditary, or Rosemary’s Baby, or Kill List.
No, here it all comes down to the wire, to one final confrontation between Thomas and Joan (who are, of course, brother and sister) in which evil is defeated…except it isn’t, as we get in a totally nonsensical rug-pull of an ending because BLERGH EVIL. The ending is as obvious, weightless, and meaningless as the rest of it, a testament to an utter lack of surprise, mystery, or deviation from basest cliché.
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Available on Netflix
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