What Makes Hugh Grant So Charming Is Also What Makes Him a Great Villain in Heretic

IF HUGH GRANT invited you into his cozy dwelling during a freak snow flurry, promising you warmth, lively conversation, and a freshly baked pastry, you wouldn’t hesitate, either. This unassailable premise is the mechanism driving Heretic, the new movie from filmmakers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods. Grant’s charm, smile, and accent are all key to what helped establish him in the ’90s and early 2000s as one of the faces of the modern rom-com—and in Heretic, those same qualities help make him into one of the best horror villains we’ve seen in a while. Who could say no to a slice of pie from Hugh Grant?

But what is it that makes him so charming? It’s got to be that smile. Or, hmm, maybe it’s that accent. Or maybe it’s his dry, dad humor and affable curmudgeon persona. Have you ever seen someone seem so delightful while simultaneously so frustrated and annoyed? And yes, of course, it’s also that legendary British courtesy, the immediate voluntary offer of shelter from the storm to strangers, not to mention a slice of pie.

Mostly, though, it’s that smile: the way the corners of his mouth snap to attention with soldierly discipline, precisely timed to assuage his guests of their mounting anxiety, discomfort, and, before long, terror. It’s not that Grant is unthreatening, but that he is disarming, and that is what makes him threatening in the end.

In the film, Grant plays Mr. Reed, a theology enthusiast whose humble hilltop home becomes a refuge for LDS Sisters Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Paxton (Chloe East) when winter’s wrath catches them out on their bikes. Reed is kindly at first, but slowly, with a jab about Barnes’s dead dad here and a blunt challenge to the Mormon practice of polygamy there, he grows less kind; one blueberry scented candle later, and the young women are trapped in Reed’s house and forced to reckon with their faith through a series of increasingly grim tests of trust, belief, and Monopoly history. (The game’s Bob Ross edition, as featured in the film, is a deep cut for all the Milton Bradley heads out there.)

Beck and Woods, the authors of the first A Quiet Place film, are well-versed with plots structured around characters entering spaces that audiences will scream at them to flee from. Haunt, their Halloween-set 2019 pseudo-slasher, largely unfolds in a haunted house attraction, and functions on similar logic. The masked employees running the show aren’t actually trying to kill them; it’s part of the experience! The whole thing is a ruse, of course, predicated on the killers’s correct assumption that no one who pays the price of admission would ever imagine that they’re being lured to their deaths. After all, it’s Halloween.

Heretic swaps out the “Halloween” for “Hugh Grant,” one of our most beloved romantic comedy leading men, now comfortably stepping into a new chapter of his career as the smarmy antagonist of such films as Paddington 2, Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, Cloud Atlas, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, and Unfrosted. The word is admittedly stretched somewhat thin in a couple of these projects. Playing international arms dealer Simmonds in Operation Fortune, Grant eventually turns face to help Jason Statham’s grumpy James Bond analogue take down the true villains: two biotech dorks. Meanwhile, in Unfrosted, Grant’s role is just a patsy, a classically trained Shakespearean actor fallen on hard times, who plays Tony the Tiger for Kellogg’s to make ends meet. The “milk syndicate,” a clandestine (and very creepy) organization wielding fearsome influence on the breakfast industry, is the real enemy.

Mutual self-awareness is at the heart of Operation Fortune and Unfrosted, a sense that the folks involved in both productions understand Grant’s reputation as an erstwhile heartthrob and all-time cad. (Recall, for instance, his delightfully curt 2023 Oscars red carpet interview with Ashley Graham, or his decisive roast of Ellen Degeneres on her show, which, in retrospect, feels like justice.) A touch of that dynamic emerges in his performances in Paddington 2, as the arrogant Phoenix Buchanan, and in Dungeons & Dragons, as the con man Forge Fitzwilliams, but neither movie is so obsessed with the novelty of Grant playing these parts that the novelty is the draw over his acting. Forget that they’re nerd-friendly (Dungeons & Dragons) and molecularly silly (Paddington 2); he gives these characters weight.

Beck and Woods get that there’s no “novelty” to Grant as an antagonist; he’s always had it in him to play the blackguard, as far back in his filmography as Small Time Crooks. Heretic is a few rungs above that movie, as well as his superb work in Paddington 2 and Dungeons & Dragons. By comparison, Operation Fortune is too half-assed a farce to give anyone room for memorable stagecraft, while Unfrosted indulges Jerry Seinfeld’s fixation with “woke” culture at the expense of being an actual movie. The lazy conceit of both is that it’s very funny for Grant–best known as Daniel Cleaver in the Bridget Jones series, Will Freeman in About a Boy, and the Prime Minister in Love, Actually–to play ne’er do wells; our job as viewers is to let the script off the hook by laughing at the stunt casting. Heretic isn’t a comedy, black humor aside, but is nonetheless susceptible to the same foibles, which Beck and Woods avoid by weaponizing Grant’s persona rather than treat it as a gag.

Mr. Reed’s rancor simmers beneath Grant’s bearing, his airs, his constitutional graces. It’s traditional in horror that characters blithely walk into peril audiences can detect by experience. Heretic is the rare film to answer this trope by giving the leads an airtight excuse for their ignorance. Mr. Reed is so hospitable and accommodating! He couldn’t possibly be hiding nefarious secrets in his basement! We do know he’s the villain here. But watching Thatcher and East put on their best Mormon manners against his relentless charm, counting the minutes until their Sisters can no longer rationalize their unease and must accept that they’re in danger, is part of Heretic’s pleasure, which ultimately flows through Grant.

Without a sharply constructed narrative and rich central theme, Heretic would work as a vessel for what’s arguably the best performance from the last decade of Grant’s career. But their knotty ideas about faith and tight plotting give his presence sturdy scaffolding. He’s enjoying himself as he finds new ways of deploying the traits and tics so core to his acting style, like that clockwork smile, used in his heyday as a rom-com star to win over co-stars, critics, and audiences alike. Heretic allows him to turn his expressions against us all. He doesn’t dispense with these traits. He simply flips them around, and draws a satisfaction from the subversion that equals the cat’s who ate the canary; the games Mr. Reed plays with Bridges and Paxton are as fun for him as it is for Grant. Frankly, it’s fun for us, too.

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