Heretic (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) shows us a side of Hugh Grant we’ve never seen before: The horror-movie antagonist. Now, he’s played a villain before, but Paddington 2 isn’t quite the prelude to his turn in A24‘s Heretic, where he plays a psycho-manipulator who draws a pair of young and naive Mormon women into his web. The film is written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who wrote A Quiet Place and directed Adam Driver dinosaur movie 65 – and now take a step forward with a nice, juicy horror-thriller.

HERETIC: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Sister Paxton (Chloe East) vehemently denies watching porn. But that one time she got a glimpse of one of those videos, she saw in the woman’s eyes “divine confirmation.” Interesting! This tells us what we need to know about this Mormon missionary who, along with Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher), pedals a bicycle around town in her maxi skirt, hoping to convert whoever will listen to their spiel. It’s a rough go. They’re subject to bullies’ taunts about “magic underwear,” and “That South Park musical kinda makes fun of us,” Sister Paxton sighs. She’s more naive than Sister Barnes, but out in the cynical-slash-realist secular world, with their wide eyes and tryhard pasted-on cheery smiles and very youthful looks (they’re 20ish, maybe 23, 24), they’re both like lambs among the wolves.

Yet there’s always hope, even if you have to peer into a wolf’s den in hopes of finding it. Of course, at first they don’t realize they’re knocking on the door of a wolf’s den, but soon enough they get That Sinking Sensation. Let’s not get ahead of things, though. There’s a “Mr. Reed” on their list of interested candidates for Mormonism, so they find his house, lock their bikes to the gate and ring the doorbell. Above them, a storm gets increasingly drenchy. He finally answers and lets them in and promises them pie and the pending arrival of his wife who he says is baking the pie, and can’t you smell the blueberries? Mmm mmm good! He’s so very cheerful, this Mr. Reed. But his wife needs to be present in the room lest the Mormon rules be broken, our Sisters insist, and he promises she’s coming, she’s coming. 

So continue without her, they must. Mr. Reed is so very receptive and welcoming and we know he’s baiting these women – this is the benefit of being the movie watcher instead of the movie character – but do they? Not sure. Perhaps it’s not That Sinking Sensation but rather the awkwardness of complete strangers discussing religion so earnestly, and our Sisters just have to push through it. Well, this Mr. Reed, with the upbeat demeanor and bright, wide smile, he starts a rather deep discussion about the nature of belief, then whips out his Book of Mormon, which is tabbed and post-it-noted like someone who’s studied the living dook out of it. And then he starts carving up Mormonism like it’s a roast turkey. “How do you feel about polygamy?” he asks pointedly, but with a giant grin. And then, “What’s your favorite fast food?” Methinks Mr. Reed is f—ing with them. F—ing with them real hard.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Heretic is part-conversation movie, part-horror movie, so it’s very roughly a mix of Barbarian or Don’t Breathe-type what’s-in-the-house-what’s-in-the-houuuuuuuussssssse movies and, I dunno, My Dinner With Andre? Hey, I said “roughly.”

Performance Worth Watching: Watching Grant go from the stammering charmer of all the best rom-coms (except Did You Hear About the Morgans? of course) to living deliciously as an evil manipulative creep with a rotten core? Delightful.

Memorable Dialogue: My two fave lines:

Mr. Reed: “My wife is shy – but the pie? The pie is nigh!”

Sister Barnes: “If I say ‘magic underwear,’ that means STAB.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Things do not go well for Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton, and I’ll say no more. That’s no surprise, mind you – one doesn’t sit down to watch a film called Heretic with its sinister one-sheet and expect it to be nothing but spirited debates about divinity and religion. But that’s essentially what it is for roughly the first half, with Mr. Reed pulling out a Monopoly board and playing Radiohead (!) to illustrate his cogent points. Of course, he does all this in a manner calculated to escalate tension, and grow the feeling of unease within his wary subjects. 

The second half becomes more like a typical psycho-horror movie, with bursts of violence, an exploration of the grimiest nooks in Mr. Reed’s house and the implementation of the crackity-bones (crackity crackity bones bones bones!) sound effect. I worry that Beck and Woods shift into ludicrous speed out of obligation, to reward the gorehounds and specterfiends out there who just sat through 45 minutes of slow-burn talky debates about religion and really need some liquid to spill lest they log on and trash the film in the forums. 

But the ideas – all deeply unsettling, about why we believe what we believe, and the things we’re told and that we tell ourselves in order to make sense of the world – remain present even as the filmmakers put their characters in ominous basements with pointy letter openers in their pockets, and unknown who-knows-what lurking behind creaky old doors. And the performances are consistently scary, funny and thoughtful, with Thatcher and East showing more guile and spunk than you might expect, especially across from Grant’s savagely entertaining scenery-chewing. Take from Heretic what you will, be it the shocks and twists or its ruminations on the slippery-slope dangers of belief, or the lack thereof. I took it as a reminder that no matter the intensity of your passionate views, convincing someone that your way is the way is a fool’s errand. You might as well be teaching algebra to your cat.

Our Call: Heretic is fresh, amusing and freaky all at once. And Mr. Reed has the stuff of a minor-classic horror character. Believe it and STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Tight as a drum and almost nauseatingly suspenseful, Tim Fehlbaum’s September 5 presents an unexpected angle on a familiar event. The violent standoff at the 1972 Munich Olympics, which saw the Palestinian terror group Black September take a group of Israeli athletes hostage — an incident that resulted in the shocking deaths of all the captives and most of the captors — has been well documented on film, most notably in Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-nominated 2005 drama Munich. Fehlbaum returns to the event via its on-the-ground transmission: the ABC sports team that, while providing round-the-clock live coverage of the Olympics that year, suddenly found itself in one of the biggest, most dramatic news events of its time.

This approach is filled with potential pitfalls. At heart it’s kind of an underdog story, about sports guys, chroniclers of the frivolous, punching above their weight when given the opportunity. Make it too much of one, however, and you undermine the deadly gravity of the situation. At one point, network headquarters suggests to ABC sports chief Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) that they let the news team handle this one, and he refuses; his guys found the story, they have access to the satellite link, and they’re the ones on the ground. Sarsgaard, who gave his greatest performance more than two decades ago in another true-life journalism drama, Shattered Glass, once again captures the right pitch for this type of role: a soft-spoken single-mindedness that can quickly shift to outrage or bewilderment as the situation demands. You can imagine this guy, with those seemingly kind eyes that also look like they could slice right through you, leading a newsroom. (The actor, who won the Volpi Cup at Venice last year for Memory, probably deserves a bit more recognition these days as one of the best we’ve got.)

The movie stays largely within the confines of ABC’s remote studio in Munich, which Fehlbaum and his crew have scrupulously re-created, reportedly down to the tiniest details. Its dark, cramped corridors and control rooms absorb the sinister mood of the events happening outside; every decision begins to feel like a life-and-death matter, even though in many of these cases it’s just journalists and technicians pressing buttons and saying words. Much of the suspense derives from the ways that the studio crew, led by Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro) and Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin), figures out how to cover the unfolding story, from tapping into radio frequencies being used by the police to dressing up a crew member as an athlete so he can smuggle canisters of film in and out of the now-cordoned-off Olympic Village. At 94 minutes, the film races by, but it also demonstrates a patience and fascination with the process — with the whirr of tape reels, the tangle of cables, the lumbering weight of cameras — that enhances the tension. By focusing so intently on this particular group of people covering this broader event, Fehlbaum finds his way into an otherwise pre-determined drama. We know what happened at Munich, yet we find ourselves living through the events as if their outcome was unwritten.

The film also takes on the quality of a conjuring. Fehlbaum has also remained ruthlessly faithful to the facts, interweaving acres of real, contemporaneous television footage with this modern-day reconstruction, so that his actors are interacting with actual images from the era. When they talk to the legendary sportscaster Jim McKay, we’re seeing the actual McKay (who died in 2008) as if he were responding in real time; when an Israeli athlete who got away from the kidnappers comes into the studio for an interview, we’re seeing the real guy. That may not sound like such a dramatic aesthetic gambit, but the incorporation is so thorough, so constant, that the movie starts to feel like a conversation with the past. Which it is: We forget, perhaps, that the presence of Israeli athletes at Munich was a big deal in 1972, just a generation and a half removed from World War II, in a landscape where the shadow of the Holocaust still loomed large.

Of course, September 5 comes at a time when it’s bound to become part of another conversation, about what’s currently happening in Palestine. The film serves as an important reminder that civilians have died on both sides of this conflict for decades — that nobody anywhere, really, has a monopoly on the murder of innocents. And while September 5 was filmed before the events of October 7 and Israel’s subsequent attack on the Gaza Strip and beyond, the filmmakers didn’t walk into this guilelessly; the struggle in the Middle East might sometimes exit the news cycle, especially in the U.S., but it’s been an ongoing debacle for most of our lifetimes.

The hermetically sealed quality of Fehlbaum’s film perhaps prevents us from reading too much into it about contemporary politics — or maybe it invites us to read whatever we want. But of course, such a framing can itself reveal the real-time political machinery of a historical event. Within this heated environment, we see how attitudes and language become codified. At one point, there’s even an internal conversation about whether to refer to the Black September captors as “terrorists.” We know how that one turned out. September 5 reminds us — as did Munich, as does No Other Land, for that matter — that it’s the drip, drip, drip of small, seemingly minor decisions and actions that wind up determining how we see, experience, and understand history.

A still from ‘The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim’
| Photo Credit: Warner Bros

There’s always been a curious magnetism to Middle Earth’s rich mythology of untold tales — the whispered legends tucked into appendices, or the histories that get only a fleeting nod in Tolkien’s pages. The War of the Rohirrim, the latest foray into this hallowed realm, takes up the challenge of unearthing one such story: the origin of Helm’s Deep, the fortress whose name alone conjures echoes of Peter Jackson’s grandiose battle sequence. 

There’s also a peculiar kind of pressure that comes with adapting Tolkien. You’re tending to the sacred flame of geekdom, stewarding a world whose fan base makes the Uruk’s look tame. Kenji Kamiyama’s anime feature is not so much a gallant charge into this rarely-charted territory as it is a cautious trot down a well-worn path, with just enough novelty to justify its existence and plenty of fodder for those who find Middle Earth’s cinematic ubiquity exhausting.

Set two centuries before the Fellowship’s arduous quest, The War of the Rohirrim focuses on Héra (voiced by Gaia Wise), the spirited daughter of Rohan’s king Helm Hammerhand (voiced with gravelly gravitas by Brian Cox). Héra is a proto-Éowyn — a horse-riding, sword-swinging shieldmaiden who dreams of defying patriarchal expectations. She is everything Tolkien’s women were often not: a warrior with a strong arc, albeit one that doesn’t quite escape the pull of predictability.

A still from ‘The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim’
| Photo Credit:
Warner Bros

Crafted by a fellowship of writers including Philippa Boyens (a veteran of Jackson’s trilogy), the screenplay tries valiantly to inject her with a sense of agency, yet she remains curiously adrift, and more of a narrative device to tie together a tale of revenge and ruin.

Revenge, in fact, is the film’s driving force. The plot kicks off when Helm accidentally one-punches a rival lord to the afterlife during some testosterone-charged negotiations. The man’s son, Wulf, swears vengeance. He is your standard-issue villain  — brooding, snarling, and single-mindedly set on destruction. 

Wulf’s siege on Helm’s Deep — the iconic fortress not yet mythologized by Gandalf’s epic third-act cavalry charge in The Two Towers — forms the better part of the story. It spans a bitter winter with an extended set piece that Kamiyama renders with a painterly menace: snow-swept battlements, dwindling supplies, and a creeping sense of doom that evokes a slow-burning dread. It’s grim, atmospheric, and at times hauntingly beautiful. 

But then the characters start talking, and the spell breaks. Over the second act, the quality of the dialogue takes a plunge off the deep end and veers into clunky exposition, robbing the quieter moments of their power, sort of like watching the Battle of the Pelennor Fields with an LOTR nerd pausing every five minutes to explain why their favourite character is an inanimate siege weapon (guilty).

Visually, The War of the Rohirrim is an intriguing paradox. Its multi-dimensional animation recalls the tactile wonders of Jackson’s films, with sweeping vistas and intricate details that pay homage to Middle Earth’s grandeur. Kamiyama’s Rohan also shares an unmistakable kinship with Ghibli. The windswept plains, dotted with lone riders against an endless horizon, feel like they’ve galloped straight out of Nausicaä. Héra’s rebellion against her father’s ironclad ideals echoes the fierce, untamed spirit of Mononoke’s San, while Helm’s descent into myth could easily pass for the sort of sombre tragedy Miyazaki might weave into his more melancholic works. 

A still from ‘The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim’
| Photo Credit:
Warner Bros

But where Ghibli tempers its bloodshed with quiet, meditative beauty — a moment to watch the wind ripple through the grass or the sun dip below the horizon — Rohirrim charges headlong into battle, its sense of wonder often lost beneath the clamor of swords and overly scripted dialogue.

What ultimately hampers The War of the Rohirrim is its own sense of obligation — to Tolkien, to Jackson, to the legions of fans who demand reverence for Middle Earth’s lore. In its best moments, the film embraces the arresting surrealism of anime or the introspective wonder of Miyazaki, but largely settles for something safer: a forgettable myth-making exercise. For a story steeped in Tolkien’s love of deliberate world-building, the rushed denouement also feels rather sacrilegious.

Still, there are treasures here for those willing to dig, and for Tolkien devotees, there is enough here to merit a watch. There’s of course a certain satisfaction in seeing Middle Earth’s cinematic universe expand, even if its endless appendices are starting to feel more and more like spinoff bait than the main quest.

Ultimately, The War of the Rohirrim is a curious beast — evoking neither the awe-struck majesty of Jackson’s epic trilogy, nor the offbeat whimsy of the Rankin/Bass animations, nor even the fever-dream charm of Bakshi’s rotoscoped oddity. It feels stranded somewhere in the middle, torn between paying solemn homage to Tolkien’s sprawling legendarium and daring to carve its own path.

‘The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim’ is currently running in theatres