Warning: This post contains spoilers for Heretic.
When two young Mormon missionaries find themselves locked in a menacing battle of wills with a suave but sinister stranger, the tenets of their faith are tested as they fight to make it out of his maze of a prison-house alive.
In the opening minutes of Heretic, now in theaters, Sister Paxton (The Fabelmans‘ Chloe East) and Sister Barnes (Yellowjackets‘ Sophie Thatcher) accept an invitation to enter the home of a seemingly kindly older man named Mr. Reed (a diabolically charming Hugh Grant), who tells them his wife is busy in the kitchen baking a blueberry pie. However, they gradually come to realize that not only is there no wife, but their host has something much more sinister in mind for their visit than learning about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
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In the process of Mr. Reed forcing them to listen to a lengthy condemnation of every major religion that exists and demanding that they make an ostensibly life-or-death choice between belief and disbelief, the girls begin to understand they’ll need to beat their captor at his own game if they have any hope of escape.
To East, who grew up in the LDS faith but is no longer practicing, the draw of Heretic is that there’s not a singularly correct way to view the puzzle-box film. “Depending on how you were raised, everyone has a different perspective on the movie and what it means,” she tells TIME in an interview. “I’m always curious about what people’s takes are. I have a lot of Mormon friends who are excited to see it. Some have already and love it for very specific reasons. And then I know people who aren’t religious at all who think it’s great but in a completely different way.”
Religion and Radiohead
As the thriller unfolds, filmmakers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who co-wrote and created the story for the 2018 horror blockbuster A Quiet Place, take viewers down a rabbit hole of hypocrisy. While Mr. Reed convincingly dismantles the theology of religious devotees like Paxton and Barnes, his case is hamstrung by the fact that he’s a self-aggrandizing fanatical zealot when it comes to his own beliefs. It’s a premise that East initially wasn’t sure she could get behind.
“There were some things I was afraid of,” she says. “When I first got the audition and I read the two-sentence logline, I felt like, oh, I don’t know if I can do this because it’s probably a one-sided religious statement. But then after reading the script, I realized it was more of an open dialogue that had this equal, opposite argument.”
Eventually, Barnes, the more grounded and steely of the two, convinces the sweet-natured and less worldly Paxton that they should remain firm in their faith and descend through the “Belief” door rather than choosing “Disbelief” and caving to Mr. Reed’s tirade—an argument that involves pop culture references ranging from Monopoly to Radiohead to Jar Jar Binks. By this point, it’s becoming increasingly clear the pair is more intellectually equipped to hold their own with their tormenter than he may have anticipated.
“This role felt very spot on for growing up Mormon and having these very deep Mormon roots and knowing Mormon culture,” East says of what made her want the part. “It’s not something I had to research or learn. I was like, I lived this. This was my childhood. These are my friends. I know this character more than anyone.”
The butterfly dream
With the girls trapped in his homemade hell of a basement, Mr. Reed proceeds to send in a sickly and disfigured woman whom he claims is a prophet, and makes Paxton and Barnes watch as she eats a poison pie and dies. Following a brief distraction that draws them back up the stairs to the basement door, the girls return downstairs and witness the woman seemingly rise from the dead and recite a prophecy to them.
However, Paxton in particular has begun to catch on to Mr. Reed’s game and realizes the woman who was supposedly resurrected was actually a different woman who switched places with the corpse using a trap door. After Mr. Reed stabs Barnes and Paxton puts together the full truth of his death-and-resurrection charade, Paxton willingly descends even deeper into the bowels of the house to prove that she’s correct about what Mr. Reed’s one true religion is: control.
Upon finding 10 or so malnourished and freezing women locked in cages, Paxton deduces that everything Mr. Reed did from the moment she and Barnes arrived at the house was designed to prove he could manipulate her into doing exactly what he wanted—just as he did to his other prisoners. Except, he doesn’t account for her repurposing the letter opener the girls found in the original two-doors room to stab him in the neck.
Unfortunately, once Paxton makes it back into the room where Barnes’ body is, an injured Mr. Reed reappears and stabs Paxton in the stomach. But before he can deliver the killing blow, a previously seemingly deceased Barnes launches up to drive a nailed board into his skull, saving Paxton. Barnes drops back to the floor dead and Paxton makes her way up into the upper levels of the house to escape through a window.
Outside in the snow, Paxton looks at her hand and sees a butterfly perched on her fingertip. Then, a quick camera cut and the butterfly vanishes, making it seem as though she’s imagining it. This scene harkens back to two earlier moments in the film—when Paxton said she’d like to be resurrected as a butterfly so she could land on her loved ones’ hands and let them know it was her, and when Mr. Reed made reference to Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi’s Butterfly Dream, a philosophical parable about the nature of reality. It’s a finale that, for better or worse, depending on your views on ambiguity, can be interpreted in a variety of ways.
“Everyone who watches it has a different experience,” East says. “I’ve seen the movie like four or five times now and my thoughts on the ending are always evolving and changing. There are so many polarizing opinions on it and I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer.”
Did Barnes simply use her last reserves of strength to kill Mr. Reed and a weakened Paxton hallucinated the butterfly? Was Barnes’ last-minute interference a miracle of divine intervention and she was then reborn as the butterfly? Is Paxton actually dead and experiencing the afterlife as described by the supposed prophet earlier in the film?
As with all questions of faith, you’re going to have to decide for yourself.
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