Heretic Makes No Sense Heretic is an American thriller movie from 2024 starring Hugh Grant, Sophie Thatcher, and Chloe East. It makes no sense.

To be clear: I enjoyed watching Heretic. The script was fun, and I thought the acting was strong overall. Sadly, it makes no sense when you think about it.

This post will contain copious spoilers. You’ve been warned.

For those who haven’t seen the movie, a brief synopsis: Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East are Mormon missionaries doing house calls to people who have expressed interest in the Mormon church. Well there’s your first bit of nonsense, who has ever reached out to the Mormon church to request a visit from missionaries? Anyway, the movie opens with them walking around town dressed casually and walking their bikes, chatting about miscellaneous topics and getting utterly ignored by everyone they pass. Their last stop of the day is to the house of a creepy Hugh Grant. They lock their bikes on the gate outside just as it starts to rain. Due to the increasingly torrential rain, they agree to come inside given Hugh’s assurance that his wife is inside making pie. After they enter, he traps them and they enter a diabolical, psychological game designed by Hugh to test their faith and satisfy his psychopathic urges.

Ok now the spoilers begin. After Sophie and Chloe realize they are trapped inside, Hugh convinces them to enter his basement by lying to them about it being an exit from his home. Shortly thereafter, a disturbing woman who looks near death enters the basement and proceeds to eat a poisoned pie. Hugh, communicating through speakerphone, instructs Sophie and Chloe that they will witness a miracle because this woman will come back to life. They check her pulse and breath and confirm she’s dead. Then, Hugh is distracted by a knock at the front door, which turns out to the a Mormon Elder who is looking for Sophie and Chloe after they failed to return to the church. During this interruption, Sophie and Chloe run to the top of the basement staircase where they start screaming in an attempt to alert their Elder about their abduction (this ploy fails). When Sophie and Chloe return to the basement the woman “comes back to life”. Shortly thereafter, Hugh kills Sophie by slicing her throat and constructs a thin narrative meant to explain why she didn’t come back to life, unlike the woman “prophet”.

This is where the movie gets pretty absurd. First of all, when the Mormon Elder arrives, it is a full-blown blizzard outside. Not rain, but snow. I’ve personally never witnessed a hard rain turn to dry snow in the matter of an hour or two. In addition, if a blizzard were that imminent, how were Sophie and Chloe comfortable walking around casually with nothing but medium-weight wool jackets and skirts? It doesn’t seem realistic that they wouldn’t have been freezing with such a strong weather front coming on.

But back to the murder basement: after rallying herself from the trauma of watching her compatriot getting murdered, Chloe successfully deduces that the key to the “rebirth” of the woman “prophet” was that Hugh somehow switched the bodies while Sophie and Chloe were busy screaming for their lives. This turns out to be true, and Chloe confirms it by identifying a trapdoor located under a table in the middle of the room, which is covered in what appears to be an established layer of mud. The premise that we’re supposed to accept is that, in the few minutes Sophie and Chloe were occupied screaming on the basement staircase, another frail woman entered the basement, moved a human corpse off of a table, moved the table away from the trapdoor, opened the trapdoor and transported the corpse into the hidden chamber, closed the trapdoor and re-sealed it with mud from the floor, moved the table back into place, assumed the position of the dead woman, and waited for Sophie and Chloe to return. (This entire series of events rests on an incredibly unlikely coincidence which we’ll discuss later.) In addition, when the new woman performs the “miracle” of coming back to life, she vomits blueberry pie onto the ground. Where did this pie come from? Does this woman posess the ability to vomit blueberry pie on demand? How long was she holding that back while she waited for Sophie and Chloe to renenter the murder basement?

After Chloe discovers the trapdoor, she enters the hidden chamber and discovers the corpse, which proves Hugh is full of shit. After Hugh seals her in this hidden chamber, she begins going deeper into the house with the hope of finding a way out. She moves through two or three separate rooms, each of which are decorated to look very creepy but otherwise hold no value to the story. The detail that bugged me the most about this entire movie is in this moment. As Chloe makes her way through this frightening sub-basement, it is continuously dripping water from the ceiling. Onto what is it dripping, you might ask? Books! Stacks and stacks of creepy books. And are the books old and rotting and moldy due to the continued water damage? No! They look pristine, as if Hugh bought an entire library of creepy books and placed them in the leakiest parts of his murder-torture-chamber just before the Mormon missionaries arrived! Does Hugh hate books? It is unclear, but it seems unlikely due to the number of well-kept books in other parts of his home. Also, where is this dripping water coming from? The movie already established that the weather is currently snow, not rain. Did Hugh install heaters in his leaky roof to melt the snow to establish a creepy (but mold-free) dampness in his sub-basement?

In the final room of the sub-basement, Chloe finds their bike lock locked to the door handle. This is suspicious too. Hugh only left Sophie and Chloe alone for a couple of minutes when he first invited them inside. He supposedly went outside, unlocked the bikes, maneuvered them inside, and placed the lock on this door, all in the first few minutes of their arrival. Have you ever walked two bikes at the same time through a narrow wooded path? It’s hard! This also would have been in plain view of his captives, if they had bothered to turn around and look through the front window. Seems like a big risk with substantial physical requirements in a tight timeframe.

Luckily Chloe has the key to the bike locks (a poorly-explained coincidence, see below), and proceeds to the final room. In the final room, Chloe finds a semi-refrigerated dungeon with 3-5 cages housing decrepit women, one of whom was presumably the “prophet” who came back to life. It is quite a disturbing scene. Hugh then enters, unveils his grand plan, and Chloe stabs him with a letter opener or something that she pilfered earlier in the film. Chloe flees, only to find herself trapped in a sadistic maze, and ends up back in the original, central murder basement room. Hugh stumbles out and stabs her, then they cuddle up to die together. Just before Hugh can deliver a final, fatal slice to Chloe’s neck, Sophie rallies her strength after bleeding out from her jugular for 30 minutes and smashes Hugh’s head with a spikey board (which is a fun callback to an earlier escape attempt). Then Sophie realizes she is actually out of blood for reals this time and lays down to die.

Chloe, suffering from a critical abdominal wound, manages to find a scaled-down model of the house, which luckily includes an unclear hint about how she can escape. Somehow the best she can do is open a single, small window located about 10 feet off the ground, so she has a rough exit. The movie ends.

While I think we covered most of the outright unbelievable parts of this film, let’s talk about the numerous unlikely coincidences which Hugh apparently relied on heavily to execute his scheme. First, the weather. If it had been a nice day, there is no reason to believe that Sophie and Chloe would have come inside in the first place. Even in the torrential rain, they are uncomfortable entering the house without a woman present; it stands to reason that if they had more pleasant weather, they would not have chosen to enter the house until Hugh’s non-existent wife showed her face. Hugh never exhibited or hinted at unnatural physical strength in the film, so there’s no reason to believe he could have forcibly abducted both women. And even if he had, it would have ruined his whole “I’m gonna mess with your minds real hard” vibe that he was so meticulously cultivating.

The most obvious and improbably coincidence in the film is that the Mormon Elder happened to knock on Hugh’s door at the precise correct moment to facilitate the body transfer which Hugh portrayed as the rebirth of a prophet. Hugh needed a way to get Sophie and Chloe out of the main basement room long enough to allow the second decrepit woman to do heavy manual labor and prepare to vomit pie. How did he plan to do this? Perhaps Hugh expected the church to check on the missionaries at some point, but there is an immaculate precision in this coincidence that really doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Can you imagine if the Mormon Elder had gotten waylaid by the blizzard and showed up 30 minutes later? Sophie and Chloe would have just been standing around awkwardly checking a dead woman for a pulse while Hugh assured them that a miracle was about to happen. It definitely would have dampened the plot.

Another bizarre coincidence was the bike lock key. When they enter the house, Sophie has the key in her pocket. Hugh takes their jackets which is how he’s supposedly able to pilfer their bikes and set the lock on the sub-basement door. When he puts their jackets on his couch (rude, you can’t even hang them properly?), Hugh apparently places the key in the wrong pocket. Later, Chloe suggests that Hugh knew he put the key in the wrong pocket, and Hugh subtly acknowledges that she is right. This is presumably the premise under which Hugh decides to kill Sophie, because he knows she doesn’t have the key and therefore wouldn’t be able to complete his sadistic experiment anyway. This all feels wildly improbable: somehow Hugh remembered which pocket he put the key in, but belatedly realized it was the wrong pocket, and then killed Sophie because she didn’t have the key, even though it’s completely reasonable and possible that Chloe would have given the key back to Sophie by this point? I dunno, feels a little fishy.

Also, was the box cutter that Hugh used to kill Sophie the same one he used to stab Chloe? Because the blade looked pretty different in those two scenes. The box cutter he used to kill Sophie looked like one of those safety cutters where the blade can only come out about a quarter inch. This design is absolutely perfect for slicing jugular veins, but less appropriate for abdominal stabbing. Later, Hugh uses a similar-but-slightly-different-looking box cutter to stab Chloe in the gut. In this scene, we see a solid 3-4 inches of blade penetrate her flesh. Did he have two different razor knives in his pocket? Why? Where did the other one go? Why didn’t he do another jugular slice, when it was so effective before?

Another strange detail is how Hugh is able to maintain such a large supply of prisoners in his refrigerated sub-basement. And where did the first one come from? It’s really a chicken-and-egg situation. Hugh’s entrapment scheme clearly depends on having two enslaved women available and willing to do his bidding; one to die eating poisoned pie, and one to vomit pie later. How did he entrap the first woman? Did he break his own rules of engagement and forcibly imprison her? That really doesn’t sound like the Hugh I know.

All in all, Heretic was a fun thriller with good suspense, solid acting, and an interesting plot. If only it made sense.

Want more “makes no sense” content? Check out The Purge makes no sense!