Hugh Grant in Heretic
HERETIC
In writer/directors Scott Beck's and Bryan Woods' captivating A24 release Heretic, a pair of Mormon missionaries visit the home of one Mr. Reed, who had formally requested the chance to learn more about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. A late-middle-aged shuffler in a cardigan, the smiling, friendly Reed seems as innocuous as could be, but because they're women of the church, his young visitors aren't allowed inside unless Reed's wife is present. She is, Reed explains – she's in the kitchen baking a pie. Clearly relieved, Sisters Barnes and Paxton enter the house. And if your guard isn't already up knowing that Beck's and Woods' latest is a horror thriller, it should be up the instant Reed opens the door, given that this charming, unfailingly polite homeowner is played by Hugh Grant.
I can hear some of you now: “But he's always so nice!” Is he, though? Those rom-coms of his really do seem to have an amnestic effect, because I have friends and relatives who are shocked – shocked! – to learn that hapless, stuttery Hugh could ever be a convincing villain, conveniently forgetting, oh, nearly all of his film and TV credits of the past 10 years. (Reaching much further back, Grant portrayed a turncoat beau in James Ivory's 1987 Maurice, and isn't the Daniel Cleaver of the Bridget Joneses an unquestionable jerk?) Four Weddings & a Funeral and Notting Hill and the like may have cemented Grant's amiable-sweetie persona. Yet Guy Ritchie has repeatedly found malevolence in the actor's wide, crinkly-eyed grins. And we should remember that, since 2016 alone, Grant's screen roles have found him cheating on Meryl Streep, gaslighting Nicole Kidman, plotting to kill Ben Whishaw, and, most unforgivably, attempting to murder Paddington. (That the slapstick-prone bear is voiced by Whishaw makes you wonder just what Grant has against that poor guy.)
For those of us who currently find Heretic's star more enjoyably unsettling than endearing, Grant's casting here is not merely ideal, but positively inspired. Because even when Mr. Reed is at his scariest, with the eventually panicked missionaries unable to leave his house, he's terrifying due to expressions, gestures, and cadences instantly familiar from Hugh Grant rom-coms. It's like if Michael Myers' Halloween mask were removed to reveal Sense & Sensibility's Edward Ferrars underneath. Grilling Sisters Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Paxton (Chloe East) about their faith – about all faiths, really – Grant's volume never rises above what librarians would call an “inside voice.” Yet the actor is stunningly threatening regardless, his recognizably benign shrugs, cheerful mugging, and self-effacing manner never masking the fact that there is one person in charge of this situation, and it isn't one of the Mormons.
Cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon pulls off some neat tricks, among them an astounding pan from a table diorama to the real world that's like a speedier, backward, more complexly rendered take on Kubrick's downward creep toward the hedge maze in The Shining. (Nearly every Beck/Woods film features one glorious “How the hell did you do that?!” shot, and this is Heretic's.) Chung-hoon achieves his most devastating effects, however, by keeping the camera almost oppressively close to the performers' faces. The proximity allows Thatcher and East, after their Sisters' respectively seasoned and guileless introductions, to play increasingly fragile states of wariness, fear, and resolve with both intense focus and admirable subtlety. Yet these closest of closeups also give us the chance to really look at Grant – to see the tautness in those “adorable” eye crinkles; to feel the tension in that “lovable” smile. Mr. Reed is hair-raising because he never really stops being the Hugh Grant, albeit an aging one, of all those '90s and '00s hits. It's just that this time, instead of carrying a bouquet, he's hiding a shiv.
On November 2, Heretic (which opens nationally on November 8) enjoyed a preview screening at Davenport, Iowa's The Last Picture House, a venue co-owned by area natives Beck and Woods. During the post-show Q&A, a patron mentioned the comparative hush of the duo's other thrillers – notably Haunt and A Quiet Place – and wondered if the filmmakers' unmistakably talky new feature was a deliberate 180-degree swerve. Beck half-jokingly replied that he and Woods will likely shoot for a nice balance between silence and chattiness next time around. But based on the evidence here, and despite my fondness for quieter places, consider me happily on-board with Beck/Woods works boasting as much conversation as possible.
Few talents would have the temerity to open their fright film with a rumination on whether Magnums really are bigger than other types of condoms, especially when those pondering the issue are young Mormon missionaries. This disarmingly funny discussion, though – one that makes genuine sense given the characters' locale at the time – is among numerous examples of Heretic's freewheeling, tangential loquaciousness. Before, and even after, he turns monstrous, Reed delivers hugely entertaining, fast-paced diatribes involving fast food and pop-song appropriation and favored board games, always cleverly bringing the point back to the tenets of faith – whether it's wiser for the Sisters to literally walk through a door marked “BELIEF” rather than “DISBELIEF.” While your nerves are in a constant jangle throughout Beck's and Woods' latest, your worry is routinely offset by unexpected notes of discordant comedy, and if it's true that Quentin Tarantino's next movie will be his last, it's reassuring knowing we have a couple of potential replacements at the ready.
Obviously, I'm not going to indulge in spoilers that aren't evident in the trailers – which is handy, because I'm not altogether certain that I understood or bought some of the final half-hour's more blatant genre indulgences. And as welcome as he generally is, I'm not sure the film needed its brief appearance by a barely recognizable Topher Grace, whose character appears to show up merely to deliver a timely narrative convenience and rather unfortunate punchline. Yet these are quibbles. Heretic is smashing, unnerving fun, and one of the best arguments to date for the continuing, thrilling slide into Hugh Grant's cinematic decadence. He's just a boy, standing in front of two girls, asking them to believe him. You know … or else.
ABSOLUTION
Many, many years ago, I began to sincerely worry about Liam Neeson.
It wasn't just that the actor seemed fiercely devoted to playing only one type of leading screen role: a miserable, leather-jacketed loner avenging the tragic death of a loved one, usually a spouse. (Neeson's own wife Natasha Richardson, you may recall, died as a result of a 2009 skiing accident.) But the films themselves were so similar in plotting, execution, and marketing – every poster was simply Liam with a Gun, as is the poster for his latest – that it felt as though the one-time Oscar nominee (for Schindler's List!) were trapped in an Escher Maze of his own design, forever doomed to repeat genre-flick history like Sisyphus eternally pushing that rock. Yet with his new star vehicle, director Hans Petter Moland's Absolution, I'm more concerned for Neeson's mental health than ever. This one is about a typical Liam lowlife whose escalating brain deterioration is causing him to forget people, locations, and his assigned missions. Could it be that Liam Neeson himself is suffering from a similar condition? Doesn't he remember that he already made this movie in 2022, when it was directed by Martin Campbell and titled, ironically enough, Memory?
Against all odds and common sense, Memory was actually pretty decent, and better than decent for deigning to treat Neeson's character malady seriously, and not simply as a plot device. As written by Dario Scardapane, Absolution is also mostly solid when it strays from its action-thriller requirements and just lets its star act. There's a scene in which Ron Perlman's crime boss asks his employee to simply recite his address, and the heartbreaking confusion and misery on Neeson's mug constitutes some of his most honest, affecting work of recent years. None of Moland's performers, in truth, are less than commendable, with special props going to the vivid Frankie Shaw as Neeson's pissed-off daughter, the naturalistic Terrence Pulliam as his grandson, and the spitfire Yolanda Ross as his decades-younger lover with buried traumas of her own. (With the romantic-partner age disparity and its lead's goal to atone for past sins of absent fatherhood, this is clearly Neeson again working in Clint Eastwood terrain.)
But I hasten to add that Ross' character, in the end credits, is listed simply as “Woman,” and Liam himself is only acknowledged as “Thug,” and other significant figures are merely “Thug's Dad” or “Priest” or “Huge Dude.” That pretty much exemplifies the amount of legitimate depth you'll find here, not that depth is what the apparently dwindling audience for Liam-with-a-Gun entertainments is craving. (Absolution's opening weekend put it in 12th place at the domestic box office.) These folks want bloody retaliation, dammit, and plenty of it.
Boy are they in for an unhappy surprise. It's more than an hour before Neeson's Thug even picks up a gun, let alone fires one, and barring a few instances of smartly directed shock effects – director Moland's 2019 Cold Pursuit being one of the rare first-rate offerings on Liam's action-stud résumé – this bummer emerges as a professionally produced yet achingly tedious slog. Not only do you see nearly every turn of events coming from a mile off, but once you reach that turn, Moland and Neeson take so much sweet-ass time offering a resolution to the scenario that you're reasonably sure you could watch another Liam-with-a-Gun outing (maybe one of the Takens) on your phone in full before the scene finally wraps. God knows there are worse releases of its type. But please let someone remind Neeson of that before the Absolution star assails us with a retread of last year's Retribution, or a similarly themed “original” title – Reparation? Vindication? Expiation? – whose operative syllable is “shun.”
HERE
You may have heard that, with the exception of its final shot, Robert Zemeckis' big-screen experiment Here positions cinematographer Don Burgess' camera in one stationary spot for the entire 104-minute running length, detailing the happenings on one modest portion of North American land from prehistoric times to the present day. The rumors are true. And not long after the dinosaurs are killed and the Ice Age subsides, we're in the 1700s, where the view from Burgess' lens gives us an optimal look at the expansive colonial home several hundred yards in the distance – a residence, we learn, belonging to the son of Benjamin Franklin. After a new home is built, the next few centuries will see plenty of occupants enduring domestic crises on this plot of land that's now a living room: an aviator and his wife; an inventor and his wife; a couple who bear an eerie resemblance to Forrest Gump and his beloved Jenny. Yet because it's almost constantly seen through the living-room window, I could never quite take my eyes off that domineering Franklin manse in the background. Principally because I truly, desperately wanted to be there – anywhere, really – other than Here.
Giving credit where it's due, let me say that Zemeckis' latest is nothing if not formally inventive, even audacious. Despite the director's and Eric Roth's screenplay being based on Richard McGuire's celebrated graphic novel, a 2014 publication that evidently did with drawn panels what Here does with moving (or not) images, it's a massive risk to give your audience literally no respite from the fixed-camera conceit until mere seconds before the movie ends. And as conceivably dull as this intentionally limited presentation sounds, it's actually not; whatever else he is, Robert “Uncanny Valley” Zemeckis is still some kind of cinematic wizard. It helps that events don't run sequentially, and after our primary locale is built, we routinely jettison between the residential centuries, and even occasionally back to the days of Early Man. Yet Zemeckis also holds our interest through strategically placed windows between one time period and other – allowing us to watch, say, a 19th-century domestic squabble while the image of a 20th-century radio appears, or a 21st-century heart-to-heart that opens a portal back to the realm of Benjamin Frankin (whose son, for what it's worth, anachronistically deems his father “a terrorist”). The approach is eye-catching as all-get-out and not unappealing, and would've meant more if the considerable technical virtuosity weren't in serve to what is, hands down, the movie year's most simpering, witless, staggeringly pandering achievement.
I honestly don't know where to begin in my hatred of this thing. Probably with Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, given that, down to the typographical font, Here is being aggressively promoted as a “long-awaited” 30th-anniversary reunion for the stars and their Forrest Gump director, screenwriter, cinematographer, and composer (Alan Silvestri, who provides appropriately, excruciatingly twinkly uplift throughout). Amazingly, I have little to no beef with the widely discussed de-aging effects that allow Hanks and Wright, as Richard and Margaret Young, to appear as teenage versions of themselves, even though they look late-20s at best. The CGI practice is certainly less bothersome than it was five years ago in Scorsese's The Irishman; in truth, I didn't much notice the youth-ifying. What I did notice was that Hanks and Wright appeared fundamentally incapable of physical accuracy as teens – despite employing higher vocal registers, they still move like people in their 50s and 60s – and they're no more believable when acting elderly and borderline infirm. Weirdly, though, they're also unpersuasive when playing their exact ages, considering their tendency to shout their lines as though the camera's inability to move meant we were unable to hear. It's like watching a badly over-acted play from a front-row seat. You want to look at anything – your shoes, the exit sign – rather than the insufferably fraudulent humans in front of you.
In fairness, however, most everyone in Here comes off poorly, because Zemeckis and Roth haven't designed characters; they've designed era-appropriate signifiers. The usually reliable Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly may be even less welcome than Hanks and Wright, as they're only allowed to play raging Baby Boomer stereotypes in their roles as Richard's parents: he the war-veteran man's-man who rules the roost, she the quietly suffering stay-at-home mom who bravely endures her husband's abuse. Yet aside from the frisky David Fynn and Ophelia Lovibond as Leo and Stella Beekman, whose invention of the La-Z-Boy is presented with a grade-school-pageant lack of subtlety, every on-screen pairing makes you cringe: that tenderly romantic prehistoric couple; the early-20th-century marrieds (with Michelle Dockery at her most one-dimensionally brittle) contending with early aviation and influenza; the post-Hanks/Wright residents whose only shared salient characteristic is that they're Black. (Nicholas Pinnock and Nikki Amuka-Bird appear to be around merely to remind us of police brutality against people of color and, when their housekeeper can no longer smell her cleaning spray, COVID.) There are no independent voices in Here. There are only mouthpieces – a literal one in Hanks' case, given that Richard is prone to ending scenes by saying “Time sure flies!” or “We'll never forget this moment!” No one in real life talks like that. If someone you're romantically involved with does, you need to break up with them immediately.
By this point, it should go without saying that Zemeckis' latest is shameless, and if you're wondering just how much action can occur with a camera fixed resolutely in place over more than an hour-and-a-half of screen time, you have no idea just how shameless the director and his co-writer can get. By my count, we witness one marriage, one death (which garnered the biggest laugh at my screening), two funerals, several attempts at intercourse, innumerable family arguments, even more copious living-room re-designs, and the upsetting yet not-unfunny sight of an infant being bounced off a couch and landing on her face.
But Zemeckis appears so maniacally obsessed with the “Look at how much changes!” poignant whimsy of it all that he doesn't seem to notice when what he's putting on-screen is deeply offensive, be it that grossly telegraphed COVID demise or Richard's dad's unconvincing break with booze. Or, in the most personally upsetting example, the character who momentarily recovers from dementia saying “I remember this place! I love this place!” An unbelievable return to clarity following a reminder of the “We'll never forget this moment!” moment. At this and other times, when not trying to withhold my giggles, I wanted to punch Zemeckis' movie square in the face. In the very last shot, one obviously designed to rekindle memories of a certain Best Picture winner from 30 years ago, a hummingbird buzzes about, and I was positive that it was going to fly directly into the camera à la the white feather at the end of Forrest Gump. Thankfully, it doesn't. That might be Here's sole instance of blessed restraint.
