Art Snob

I saw seven films at this year's TIFF, and the one that got my vote for best picture was HERETIC starring Hugh Grant (who also would have gotten my vote for best actor if that was a voting category). I was very impressed seeing him get in touch with his dark side in the HBO miniseries THE UNDOING, but here he takes it to 11 playing an affable, religion-obsessed psychopath. It's a break from his rom-com persona of schizophrenic proportions.

Co-stars Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East are also excellent playing two Mormon missionary girls who think that they will be calling on someone interested in converting to Mormonism. But Grant turns out to be far more erudite - and questioning -- about religion than they expected. When they realize that he's not really interested in converting but more in debating religion, they try to depart but discover that they're trapped inside. So begins a cat and mouse game where Grant puts their faith to the test.

As horror goes, it's solid, but doesn't reach the extremes of similarly claustrophobic horror films like FUNNY GAMES (original) and SPEAK NO EVIL (2022 version). The outcome is refreshingly unconventional. My only cavil is that the choice of Mormonism for the religion seems a tad calculated.

In short, see this movie if you've ever enjoyed a Hugh Grant film and want to see him at the peak of his game. I haven't felt this sure about an acting Oscar nomination for a TIFF film since I saw Allison Janney in I TONYA in 2017

Side note: There was a Q & A after the film and several people commended me on the way out for a question I asked: "Was Richard Dawkins an influence?" Co-director Bryan Woods confirmed that he was.

Most of the movies I saw at this year's TIFF were pretty much "eh," but this one made the trip worthwhile. It takes a lot to push the envelope on movie violence, but this film does it! I could tell while watching that it had multiple sequels written all over it, and sure enough, director Hong-seon Kim revealed during the post-screening Q&A that both a prequel and sequel are already in the works.

The structure is highly similar to ALIEN: dealing with a monstrous menace from inside a contained space. Instead of a spaceship and its crew, we have a ship that's being used to transfer criminals extradited from the Philippines to Korea. They stage an escape attempt that's plenty bloody, but things are just getting started.

Also on the ship is a humanoid biological experiment that gets freed in the turmoil. From this point on, the bloody mayhem kicks into fourth gear. The monstrous one-time human is a merciless killing machine like you've never seen before. He rips people apart with his bare hands and spares nobody. Dubbed "Alpha," he makes Freddy Kruger look like Santa Claus. The film includes a brief backstory on how he came into existence -- so you know that there's no way that this can be a singular appearance.

Hong-seon Kim has certainly put together an impressive high-octane splatterfest. I detected some Michael Haneke influence in that he seems to delight in confounding your conditioned expectations as to how things are going to unfold. Know going in that the surprises are many and nothing's sacred.

Not for the faint of heart -- to put it mildly -- but if you can take movies with graphic violence, this one's a not-to-miss. It definitely succeeds in making you look forward to continuation.

I've seen French movies about adolescent girls (Catherine Breillat's Une Vraie Fille, 36 Fillette, and À Ma Soeur! to name three) that make this film look like Sesame Street. I give it a thumbs down due to its copout ending, but for a while it looked like it might be an interesting treatise on the impossibility of maintaining Muslim values across generations in western society. The campaign some puritans are waging against it is nothing less than "Hays Office 2." Especially contemptible is Ted Cruz attempting to make political hay off of it without ever seeing it. Let's not let streaming movies go down the same path that theatrical movies did long ago or let this film become a political football.