Heretic: Good Guy Goes Bad

I’ve never been much of a Hugh Grant fan. The goofball charm, British-accented thing, the mumbling, stammering charm…I guess I just never bought it. I always felt like he was just a random guy who found a schtick that happened to make American women swoon. But it turns out that I was wrong. Hugh Grant is amazing. And the casting director who put him in that role is even more amazing.

Because here’s the thing: every time you see an actor whom you’ve seen half a dozen times in one particular kind of role playing an entirely different kind of role, it hits hard, and better. This is especially true when you see a counterintuitive casting choice in a horror film. Because the whole thing feels estranging and disorienting. It feels impromptu, spontaneous, unpredictable. It feels somehow more real, more acute, more dangerous. Because you think you know this actor’s moves and temper, but suddenly—boom—you’re seeing a radically different person.

My favorite instance of this phenomenon is the casting of Gregory Peck in The Omen. Peck is all the more credible and powerful as the confused, feckless, patriarchal, would-be child murdering ambassador Robert Thorn, given that what most American audiences associated Peck with by 1976 (the year The Omen came out) was his earlier performance as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. Atticus was a highly moral, idealistic, brilliant rhetorician, kind, liberal, ahead of his time. Watching Peck play Thorn in The Omen only makes his descent into murder and the occult all the more horrific and shocking. We expect better of Peck. We expect him to be Atticus Finch, not Robert Thorn. So when Peck ultimately acquires a kit of ritual knives with which to slaughter his own three-year-old son, we are all the more horrified for the contrast with our expectation.

Similarly, when we see two young, beautiful Mormon girls—sister Barnes and sister Paxton—showing up at the house of Mr. Reed/Hugh Grant in the middle of a late Autumn storm in the Pacific Northwest, hoping to convert him to Mormonism, we think, Jesus, this is a crazy situation, but at least it’s Hugh Grant. Hugh Grant would never, ever hurt anyone. Especially not two innocent young girls. The hero of Four Weddings and a Funeral is absolutely not a rapist or murderer. Certainly not a serial abuser of women. Even though we’ve seen the previews, some part of our brain carries forward the emotional memory of other prior encounters with Grant. They’ll be ok, probably, in the end. He can’t be THAT bad.

But oopsie-daisy! He totally is a serial abuser of women—or, well, his character in this movie certainly is. In fact, he’s a serial imprisoner, torturer, dehumanizer, and murderer of women. Just as the film sets up sisters Barnes and Paxton to assume the best of the Hugh Grant character, it sets us up to expect the best of him as well. Even if we’ve seen half a dozen trailers for the film, there’s a certain amount of cognitive dissonance, where some part of our brain keeps playing the Four Weddings script, even while we watch Hugh Grant systematically entrap, deceive, more deeply entrap, assault, terrorize and murder these young Mormon women (or, one of them really; the other escapes.)

So, I enjoyed how hard Heretic leaned on this cognitive dissonance. But I didn’t enjoy it merely as an aesthetic effect. I enjoyed it primarily for its political meaning.

The reality is that most sex offenders, most predators, most domestic abusers, most interpersonal terrorists simply don’t look that bad from a distance. They look like someone you know. All too often, they are someone you know. In fact, that’s how they groom their marks: they know perfectly well how to appeal to the women that they reel in, only to torture. Put briefly: monsters only very rarely look like monsters. Usually, they look like Hugh Grant (sorry, Hugh: I don’t mean literally you. You seem ok.) We all know—I hope—that a huge majority of acts of sexual violence committed against women (and men) are committed by familiar, trusted people. We all probably also know that the vast majority of acts of physical violence committed against women are committed by women’s domestic partners—again, people who are (or were, at one point) trusted intimates. What’s brilliant about this film, seriously revelatory and powerful, is that it highlights the process by which women—like the two Mormon women in the film—get ensnared, entrapped, dehumanized, and tortured. It happens not because they fail to read the signs of their tormentors’ malice and cruelty, but because—early on—there are no fucking signs. You don’t see how bad it will be to share a space with someone until it’s too late, until you are inside the house, so to speak.

The film, in fact, takes great pains to show that the two young women are well aware of how dangerous it can be to enter into a closed domestic space with a man—they reveal that they cannot come inside unless their host’s wife is present. He swears that she is there, in the back, baking a blueberry pie. They can smell the blueberry pie, so there’s physical evidence—they think—that he’s telling the truth. They enter his home because of the smell, and because the weather outside is frightful. They need to take shelter, and they are convinced enough that this man’s house is safe, because there’s a woman in there somewhere, in the back, baking pie. The smell is familiar; their bodies relax.

Soon, as they sit in his living room, he reveals to them that he owns a heavily annotated copy of The Book of Mormon. He may not yet share their faith, but he appears to be curious about it, respectful, eager to learn about them and their beliefs. He appears, moreover, to take them both seriously as conversation partners. He solicits their opinions. He looks nothing like what you might think predators should look like. But he looks exactly like experts know predators look like. Solicitous. Interested. Vulnerable. Eager. Maybe a little too solicitous, interested, vulnerable, and eager.

Once the true cast of Grant’s character’s character is revealed, we learn that, in addition to being a predatory misogynist, he’s a tourist of major world religions, obsessed with the idea that all major world religions are fundamentally the same, or, rather, that they are all pathetic derivatives of each other. So he’s a virulent atheist. Kind of. At the same time, he is desperate to find a true religion that transcends all the bullshit, all the repetition, all the derivation. He is desperate to find a kind of bedrock of human experience, something real, enduring, ungainsayable. He teases the two girls throughout the film to figure out what the one thing is that is the bedrock of belief.

Eventually, he reveals his answer: control.

Now, at this point, I was thunderstruck. I was absolutely convinced that the answer was going to be one of two things: power or fear. Like, I was so convinced, I was rolling my eyes every time Mr. Reed/Grant posed the question. But by choosing the word control, the film allied itself with cutting edge research on domestic abuse, gender-based violence, sexual violence and assault, and intimate partner violence. To explain what I mean, let me take you on a quick tour of the last 50 years of research on these kinds of gender-based violence and abuse.

Well into the 1970s, the most common explanation for why women were assaulted, beaten, raped, and violated in the domestic context was that they were locked into voluntary sado-masochistic relationships with men. Over the course of the 1970s, however, a number of ground-breaking studies and books were published that decisively showed that women were well and truly trapped in situations of domestic violence, and that society needed to step up the pace in prevent acts of atrocious violence against them. Battered women’s shelters were opened; state and federal monies were set aside to help women extricate themselves from bad situations; laws were changed; policing evolved. Things improved. But they didn’t improve as much as they should.

In 2007, Evan Stark published Coercive Control. This ground-breaking and revolutionary book showed that, after the heyday of the movement in opposition to violence against women, the safety of women in domestic or intimate relationships plateaued. It plateaued because the movement had focused on the idea of wife battery. And once that particular phenomenon seemed slightly to have tapered off, in the wake of the 1970s/80s Women’s Rights Movement, the public will to keep exploring the problem kind of withered. But Stark demonstrates that abuse goes way, way beyond physical battery, to include threats, dehumanization, verbal assaults, restricting access to money, restricting access to friends and family, imperiling children, restricting what a woman can eat or drink or wear, cyber-bullying, or anything designed to keep a woman in a domestic setting under the control of her abuser. Abuse is not just about sadism. It’s not just about the desire to batter women. Abusers want to control their prey, body, mind and soul.

Evidently, someone responsible for making Heretic had read that book. Or at least had encountered the idea of coercive control.

What “Hugh Grant” wants in Heretic is control. Yes, he wants to dehumanize, to bestialize, to enslave, to hurt, to maim the women he entraps. All of that is true, too. But he wants all of those things because of his ultimate goal, which is revealed when we find our way to the underground room where he has a dozen women bent over in small metal cages, deprived of light, clean water, or food. He wants them to be weak, dehumanized, malnourished pets. He doesn’t particularly want to hit or rape or strangle the women he imprisons. He may indeed do any or all of those things to them, and in one scene, he does snip off a woman’s finger. But what he wants most is indeed control. That, for him, is the true religion.

In the end, sister Barnes (who had appeared to be dead for much of the film) suddenly lurches up and beans “Hugh Grant” on the side of the head with a 2x4 that has three nails sticking out of it. Three nails. Three. Like the Trinity. Nails. Like, well, nails. So there’s a sudden but fascinatingly revisionist Christian moment here: girl seems dead, but isn’t fully dead. Resurrects in time to save the other girl, and does do with a three-nailed piece of wood. It’s almost, almost, almost a retelling of the resurrection of Jesus. Moreover, it happens while sister Paxton believes she’s about to die at Mr Reed’s/Hugh Grant’s hands, and decides passionately to pray, rather than giving in to his efforts to control her. After the resurrected sister Barnes beans Reed/Grant, sister Paxton escapes, makes it outside, to a beautiful, snowy world of butterflies and lovely lighting. It’s very clearly a resurrection scene, a scene of hope and faith, a scene of decisively religious survival. Put bluntly: Jesus wins in the end.

Now, I’m a medievalist. I study Christianity in the Middle Ages. And I love Christianity passionately as a field of study, and I very deeply admire Christianity as a faith and religion. But to give this particular film a Christian resurrection ending really, really, really pissed me off. Because here’s the reality: Christianity cannot get women out of situations of coercive control.

Women need better laws. They need friends who don’t just sit back as they hear increasingly worrying reports from the homefront. They need allies. They need physicians who take their complaints seriously and listen between the lines for signs of abuse. They need clergy who tell them not to trust Jesus to save them, or to heal their abuser’s addled mind, but instead, simply, to try to get the fuck out. Coercive controllers are notoriously hard to reform, as scholar-activist-therapists like Lundy Bancroft have argued. They are also notoriously hard to escape. Their victims can’t just rely on God. They need interventions from mortal human people in their communities and networks.

And of course, to be fair to the film, it was actually sister Barnes who saved Paxton. A real, mortal, human person.

This film is fascinating because it is, very deeply, about domestic abuse. But the conceit of the film, of course, is that the “domestic relationship” between the Mormon teenagers and “Hugh Grant” is supposed to be temporary and transactional. He’s not their father, or their boyfriend, or their husband, or their uncle. Instead, he’s Hugh Fucking Grant. This is the kind of allegorical displacement that we, as a culture, need to see, if we are going to crack the problem of coercive control. We have to realize that coercive control can come from the corners where we might least expect it. The most familiar, cozy corners. Like a movie starring Hugh Grant.