In Review: 'Heretic,' 'Bird'

A horror film and a new Andrea Arnold drama turn the focus on young people trying to escape extremely different types of traps.

Heretic
Dir. Scott Beck and Bryan Woods
110 min. 

It only takes the slightest twist of the knob for Hugh Grant, the dashing rom-com charmer of Notting Hill and Love, Actually, to become the grinning heel of, say, Paddington 2, because that image of the debonair Brit can so readily accommodate an ulterior motive. Yet there’s a sinister firmness to his performance in the clever, surprisingly substantive horror film Heretic that makes his stunt casting as the antagonist so effective. He’s as deft at putting women at ease as ever, which is how the events of the film are allowed to happen, but he can also turn on the charm to a conspicuously off-putting and inauthentic degree. Even at his rom-com best, he maintained a nagging sense of detachment, as if he were truly a cad at heart, but it might take a little time for the heroine to figure that out. Maybe some of those happily-ever-afters ended in divorce. 

Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East) sniff out Grant’s no-good Mr. Reed in Heretic quickly enough, but not before he has them where he wants them. Barnes and the less-experienced Paxton are Mormon missionaries in Colorado, eager to convert people who have expressed an interest in learning more about the church. When Mr. Reed opens the door to his warm, tastefully appointed single-family home—there’s a “Bless This Mess” embroidery on the wall—the missionaries are reluctant to enter, because they’re not supposed to be there without a woman present. But this is where Mr. Reed, a character played by Grant, excels at reassuring them, claiming his wife is just in the kitchen making blueberry pie. 

Needless to say, a slice is not forthcoming. It’s not a spoiler to say that Mr. Reed traps the young women inside his home, but the hows and whys of their capture leave many surprises left to be sprung. The writer-director team of Scott Beck and Bryan Woods—who wrote the first A Quiet Place and made the quite-a-bit-less-ballyhooed Adam Driver sci-fi thriller 65 last year—have constructed an A24 Saw, with Mr. Reed as the erudite Jigsaw expressing his philosophy through a series of trials. Barnes and Paxton make for compelling sparring partners, too, with one a more worldly and grounded young woman with a difficult past and the other naive yet perceptive. It’s a reasonably fair fight, given Mr. Reed’s home court advantage. 

It’s hard to shake a sense of deja vu as the Heretic house starts to feel a bit like the house in Barbarian, a seemingly normal residence that turns out to be anything but. And like that film, Heretic isn’t particularly scary, relying more on surprises than out-and-out shocks. (Though both have the requisite amount of the latter.) What distinguishes Beck and Woods’ film, outside of the three sharp lead performances, is that it’s better than expected as a Big Ideas movie, with Mr. Reed specifically challenging his captives on religious doctrine and leaving them to respond. In between gasps of terror, of course. — Scott Tobias

Heretic opens this week in theaters everywhere.

Bird
Dir. Andrea Arnold
119 min.

There’s a romantic spirit that separates the films of Andrea Arnold from the miserablist, kitchen-sink realism of other British directors who delve into the unstructured and dysfunctional lives of the underclass. Even when Arnold left the housing hovels of Glasgow (Red Road) and London (Fish Tank) to follow a teenager selling dodgy magazine subscriptions through the Heartland in American Honey, she would still grasp for those moments when chaos and uncertainty suddenly tumbled into transcendence. She can be regrettably unsubtle about it, too: When a Rihanna single with the chorus “We found love in a hopeless place” plays multiple times, it’s hard to miss her meaning. At the same time, her love for these characters is genuine, and it’s neither unreasonable or too sentimental to believe that their lives are not full of relentless, unrelieved misery.

Arnold’s new film Bird, set is working-class Kent, the county where she was born, suffers a block-that-metaphor conceit that’s right there in the title. Her protagonist Bailey (Nykiya Adams), a 12-year-old who seems aged much older by experience, is first shown filming seagulls and crows with her ever-present smartphone, and there’s no mistaking the longing she feels in observing her. Birds represent freedom and her life is only free to the extent that every day is a rolling shitshow, where the most responsible adult in her life, her way-too-young father Bug (Barry Keoghan), is distracted by hare-brained pursuits and her older brother Hunter (Jason Buda) is enmeshed in a local gang. To this, Arnold adds an actual character named Bird, played by the singular German actor Franz Rogowski, who appears out of nowhere and bobs around like such a whimsical sprite that we immediately question how real he is.

The infusion of magical realism into Arnold’s too-expected brand of hardscrabble realism knocks Bird off balance, because it always feels like she’s imposing herself too much on this scenario for any of it to seem plausible. As Bailey, however, Adams makes for a compelling center, because she’s trying to work her way through impossible situations while keeping herself safe and trying to hold on to her inane compassion. Keoghan is a treat, too, as a certified dipshit who’s relatively good for an unfit father and seems wholly convinced that his quickie marriage to a woman he’s only known for three months and his investment in a hallucinogenic toad will pay off. (His theory that music will help trigger the toad’s secretions is one of the film’s precious moments of silliness.)

The pop sensibility that Arnold brought to American Honey carries over to Bird in its best sequences, like an opening where Bug scoops up Bailey on his motorized scooter and zips through Kent in an exhilarating introduction to the grimy urban backdrop. (Note to other directors: Please considers scooters, rather than drones, to establish your location.) Yet there’s nothing unexpected to Bird, despite Arnold trying to mix things up with Rogowski’s odd presence as a kilt-wearing stranger who seems to have one foot in this grim locale and the other in a more inviting fantasy world. He’s like a Mr. Snuffleupagus that other people can see, too. Arnold clings to him as fervently as Bailey does, hoping as she does that he can fly her out of the muck. But in the muck the film stays. — Scott Tobias

Bird opens in limited release this weekend.