This article contains spoilers for the movie Heretic.

When I was a Mormon missionary in Texas in the early 2000s, my companions and I used to get strange phone calls from a man with a British accent named Andrew. We didn’t know who he was, or how he’d gotten the numbers for a bunch of Church-owned cellphones, but the calls always went the same. He would begin in a friendly mode, feigning interest in our lives and work. Then, gradually, the questions would turn confrontational as he revealed his true agenda: to convince us that everything we believed was wrong. Sometimes he’d drop cryptic allusions to controversial Mormon history that he assumed we didn’t know; other times he’d try to fluster us with theological gotchas. Most of us found him amusing, and he became a figure of lore in our mission, someone to swap stories about—Andrew called again! But I remember finding the weird, gleeful quality of his performances mystifying. As a missionary in the Bible Belt, I could understand the proselytizing instinct of the Baptists we met who tried to save us from hell. Andrew, though, wasn’t trying to convert us to anything in particular—he just wanted us to admit he was right. Later, I would meet missionaries from other places who’d gotten similar calls from an unidentified zealous Brit. Was this a hobby for him? An obsession? How much time was he dedicating to this project?

I never solved the mystery of Andrew. But when I returned home and joined the rest of my generation on the internet, I realized that his type—a man whose personal passion was to argue with random strangers for no evident payoff beyond personal catharsis—was not uncommon.

I found myself thinking about Andrew recently after seeing Heretic, a horror-thriller released this month by A24. The movie follows Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton, two young female missionaries for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who show up on the doorstep of a man named Mr. Reed, played by Hugh Grant. He invites them in under the pretense that he’s interested in learning about their faith, only to trap them in his labyrinthine home so he can torture them—first with a lengthy disquisition on the falsity of organized religion, then (in what may have come as almost a relief to the missionaries) with psychological torment and violence.  

It is possible to read Heretic as a dark satire of a distinctly 21st-century type: the militant New Atheist who won’t shut up. Smug and self-righteous, he is consumed with an absolute conviction in his worldview that would rival that of a Pentecostal snake-handler. He can’t accept that he lives in a world where people—especially women—hold beliefs that he finds irrational. And in Heretic, the villain gets to act out what might seem like a fantasy for many such men: locking young religious women in his house and monologuing at them until they surrender to his intellect.

[From the January/February 2021 issue: The most American religion]

But if Heretic’s strength is the spot-on characterization of its villain, its weakness is showing too much interest in his Reddit-level ideas about religion.

Right off the bat, you might be wondering just how watchable any of this is. In trying to describe the film to an Atlantic colleague recently, I explained that much of Heretic’s first hour is devoted to the villain’s philosophical arguments against religion. “Is it … terribly dull?” the colleague asked. Like many of us, he had spent time in conversation with monologuing atheists, and did not come away thinking, That would make great cinema!

Mr. Reed’s essential argument—which he delivers to the missionaries in a lengthy, Galt-like lecture from a faux chapel he’s constructed in his house—is that today’s major world religions are simply rearrangements of more ancient mythologies. The biblical character of Jesus Christ, he argues, is a rejiggered version of the Persians’ Mithras, or the Egyptians’ Horus, or the Hindus’ Krisha—all gods who were purportedly born on December 25, who performed miracles and were resurrected after death. “My claim is that all 10,000 verifiable religions that exist worldwide right now are as artificial as the symbolic church you are standing in,” Mr. Reed declares. “It is farce. There’s nothing holy here.”

Grant does his best to make this material compelling, performing it with a creepy, cool-professor smarm, and making entertaining use of various props (board games, pop records) to illustrate Mr. Reed’s ideas. But the ideas themselves are the movie’s biggest defect. Anyone who has given serious thought to religion is likely to find them too superficial and stale to be interesting.

“I found myself checking out a bit,” one critic wrote in the Mormon journal Wayfare. “How many times have I heard this neo-Campbellian spiel that distorts Asian religions from the comfort of an armchair, reducing ancient systems of belief to the level of twentieth-century entertainment franchises?” Matthew Bowman, a historian of religion at Claremont Graduate University, wrote, similarly, that he “slumped a bit” in his seat as Mr. Reed sermonized. Bowman recognized his rant as a “fringe academic hypothesis” known as Jesus mythicism that’s “rejected by nearly all scholars of Christian history and the ancient world” but that has nonetheless found “a vast array of adherents on the internet.”

Just how seriously viewers are meant to take these ideas is open to interpretation. The character articulating them is, after all, a murderous psychopath. But the movie devotes considerable time to its villain’s ideology and seems to consider his diatribes provocative and sophisticated, even profound. Bryan Woods, who wrote and directed Heretic along with Scott Beck, has said that Mr. Reed is meant to have a “genius-level IQ.” It seems that we are supposed to think of Mr. Reed as brilliant but extreme—a man who, in the tradition of Marvel bad guys and Bond villains, takes a good point much too far. (Think of Black Panther’s Killmonger.)

Eventually, Mr. Reed tells the terrified young missionaries that they’re free to go but that they must choose between two identical doors, one of which he has labeled belief and the other disbelief. A test of faith has commenced. The movie, to its credit, allows the women at this point to challenge him intellectually. Sister Barnes, in particular, gets off a few lines about Mr. Reed’s “thin rhetoric” and reductive framing. “There is an entire spectrum that your game is neglecting,” she says, correctly. But unfortunately for her, and for viewers, she winds up dead a few minutes later.

Much of the Mormon discourse around Heretic has focused on questions of representation. Thirteen years into The Book of Mormon’s run on Broadway, many in the Church are inured to seeing missionaries treated as punch lines; we’re somewhat less used to seeing their throats slit on screen. When the trailer dropped this past summer, many Latter-day Saints assumed that the movie would be an anti-Mormon gorefest.

Graphic violence aside, the film is less antagonistic to Mormonism than other recent pop-cultural treatments. Unlike Hulu’s Secret Lives of Mormon Wives—which draws on a microscopic subculture of swinger-adjacent Utah TikTokers to draw sweeping conclusions about their Church—Heretic’s story is grounded in something millions of Latter-day Saints have actually experienced (missionary service, that is, not being trapped in Hugh Grant’s basement). And unlike the 2022 FX series Under the Banner of Heaven, which dramatized a double-murder  committed by fundamentalists in the 1980s to advance its dubious thesis that Mormonism “breeds dangerous men,” this movie doesn’t seem to have any particular axe to grind with Latter-day Saints.

In fact, the two missionaries at the center of the story are sympathetic and complex. The actors, Chloe East and Sophie Thatcher, both grew up Mormon, and some of the most authentic moments in the movie were reportedly ad-libbed. (Ex-missionaries will chuckle when Sister Paxton assures Sister Barnes in one early scene that for every flight of stairs they have to drag their bicycles up, their future husbands will get “10 percent hotter.”) Not everything in the movie rings true—most notably the groaner of an opening scene in which the two missionaries discuss condom size—but for the most part, I was pleasantly surprised by how well drawn the protagonists were. Maybe the bar is just exceptionally low. What does it say about Mormon media representation that the most sympathetic portrayal in recent memory involves missionaries getting violently tortured by a lunatic?

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In their press tour, the filmmakers have repeatedly said that they wanted to take their Mormon characters seriously, to treat them with empathy instead of condescension. This admirable notion has been somewhat undermined by the film’s marketing campaign, which has included, among other things, displaying fake MISSING posters for the fictional missionaries at the Salt Lake City airport, where hundreds of real-life missionaries fly in and out each day. (The Church’s official response to Heretic, incidentally, focused on concerns for the security of its 80,000 missionaries serving around the world. “Any narrative that promotes violence against women because of their faith or undermines the contributions of volunteers runs counter to the safety and wellbeing of our communities,” the Church spokesman Doug Andersen said in a statement.)

In the end, the film doesn’t actually have all that much to say about Mormonism specifically. The filmmakers have been honest in interviews about the constraints they faced. When they first started writing the script, they realized they didn’t know enough about religion to finish it. They had to spend a decade brushing up on religious texts and Richard Dawkins books before they felt they could return to the story. (Woods’s wife, Julia Glausi, is a graduate of Brigham Young University.) The film they ultimately made is suspenseful, creepy, and expertly staged and acted. But I found myself wondering what the movie would look like if it had been made by filmmakers whose exploration of faith was less academic and more deeply rooted in personal experience—filmmakers who’d wrestled with religious questions deeper and more difficult than the ones their villain poses.  

As it turns out, we almost got to see such a movie. In 2022, a group of student filmmakers at Brigham Young University made a short film called The Handbook that shares a premise with Heretic: Two Mormon missionaries enter the home of a seemingly sweet stranger who turns sinister and traps them inside. I got in touch with Brandon Carraway, who wrote and directed the short film with his wife, Hannah Grace, and he told me that the idea had grown out of his experience as a missionary. Most of the cast and crew, he said, had served Latter-day Saint missions as well. After The Handbook screened at a few festivals, an agent asked them to write a feature-length version. They started taking meetings with studios, but the project died after A24 announced it was developing Heretic. (A source close to A24, who requested anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak on behalf of the movie, told me that the similarities between the films are “pure coincidence” and that Beck and Woods had not seen the short.) Carraway had nothing bad to say about Heretic but told me simply, “I think ours would have been a different movie.”

In Heretic’s climatic scene, Sister Paxton enters a dark, leaky subbasement and discovers a room filled with women being held in dog cages. She and her companion, it turns out, were not Mr. Reed’s first victims. On cue, the villain materializes to deliver the argument to which he’s been building throughout the movie. The “one true religion,” he tells the young missionary, is “control.”

The upsetting scene has drawn a variety of complaints. Some think the glib ambiguity about the women’s fate is irresponsible. Others take issue with the substance of Mr. Reed’s claim (though I’d argue their real issue is with Karl Marx, who beat him to this particular insight about 150 years ago). But the scene I left the theater thinking about takes place a few minutes later. Sister Paxton and Mr. Reed lie bleeding out on the floor of the basement, apparently on the verge of death. For the first time in the movie, we see the devout young missionary pray, but not before delivering an eloquent monologue of her own—about the scientific inefficacy of prayer. In between pained gasps, she recites the findings of a 1998 Templeton Foundation study on intercessory prayer, which found no connection between medical outcomes and divine appeals. “I think it’s beautiful that people pray for each other, even though we all probably know deep down it doesn’t make a difference,” the missionary says. “It’s just nice to think about someone other than yourself.”

It’s a sweet sentiment, but it feels more like a secular screenwriter’s cop-out than a sincere articulation of how most devout people feel when communing with God. The people I know who pray are not consumed with questions like Does this work? Where’s the proof? Am I right? The real beauty in prayer, like religion in general, is in its transcendence of the empirical and its embrace of the mysterious and divine. Faith, much to the frustration of the world’s Mr. Reeds, is not something one can be talked out of.

The clearest candidate for America’s favorite fairy tale might be The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The author L. Frank Baum set the novel, published in 1900, in a fantasy land that shares core American values: self-sufficiency, personal reinvention, the exploration of wider frontiers. The book’s young heroine, Dorothy, is whisked away to Oz, where she befriends magical creatures, thwarts a witch, and leans on her newfound strength and friends in order to return home. For Dorothy, it is a land of empowerment and possibility; for Baum—who perpetuated manifest destiny’s warped ideals in his other writings—and his many readers, it was an otherworldly representation of the American expanse, a place they perhaps wanted to see for themselves.

Baum’s novel and its sequels were major literary phenomena in their day. But Oz persists primarily through the books’ many adaptations, which established the series’ enduring iconography. Baum’s world is best remembered as it has appeared on-screen, especially in the 1939 musical film starring Judy Garland as Dorothy: a place bursting with songs such as “Over the Rainbow” and visuals such as the yellow brick road, which have become the franchise’s most memorable features. And with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’s 1956 entry into the public domain, allowing for new, noncanonical works, subsequent generations have iterated on these hallmarks to tell Oz stories of their own.

No transformation has been more vital to Oz’s longevity than Wicked, the revisionist origin story of the Wicked Witch of the West, one of Baum’s most recognizable villains. Based on the author Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel of the same name, Wicked’s prominence is up there with that of its source text, and yesterday’s release of the first part of the musical’s highly anticipated film adaptation will undoubtedly broaden its reach. Key to Wicked’s success—and its ability to bridge Oz’s past and future—is its canny understanding of what, exactly, makes that world work so well.

Artists across genres and mediums have, for decades, found great storytelling potential in Baum’s characters and mythology. But the mode that Oz has continued to lend itself to best is musical theater, a genre predicated on suspension of disbelief and thus well suited to conveying Oz’s odd earnestness. The Wizard of Oz’s 1903 Broadway musical debut was a hit, firing up demands for more stories, which prompted Baum to write a total of 13 sequels to his book.

[Read: The Wizard of Oz invented the ‘good witch’]

The Garland film, inspired in part by the success of the musical, cemented Oz’s connection to music, but it was The Wiz that brought it back to the theater, in 1974. The latter was the franchise’s first majorly reenvisioned entry, a celebration of Black culture that took Dorothy’s story to the 1970s. During its four-year run on Broadway, The Wiz earned several Tony wins; the (less well-received) film adaptation notably starred the then-superstars Diana Ross and Michael Jackson as Dorothy and the Scarecrow, respectively. The Wiz showed that Baum’s novel could be successfully reinterpreted within a contemporary frame, and its story and characters updated accordingly. This transposition didn’t sacrifice the core imagery and themes—Dorothy still fights off flying monkeys and dons magic slippers to make it back home—but instead retained and even grew their cultural power.

Oz hasn’t translated as well into dramatic, adult-oriented settings, despite numerous writers’ and filmmakers’ efforts. The 1985 Disney film Return to Oz reintroduced the world by utilizing lesser-known characters from Baum’s later books; although it exhibited Oz’s compelling peculiarities, such as sentient furniture and disembodied human heads, it was a critical and box-office failure, deemed too dark for young viewers. Science-fiction authors including Robert Heinlein, Philip José Farmer, and even Stephen King wrote stories incorporating Oz that received mixed reviews. The Syfy miniseries Tin Man and NBC’s one-season flop Emerald City also mostly failed to resonate. Only Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West—a tale laden with adultery, murder, and slavery—has taken hold of the popular imagination. Wicked has become the contemporary Oz text, perhaps even superseding Baum’s work: It carries forward the original novels’ mix of campy magic and violent spectacle while bringing in modern literary themes. Maguire’s biggest change was recasting Baum’s antagonist as the antihero, reframing a straightforward villain as a woman misunderstood by her peers—an experience likely more relevant to today’s readers than Dorothy’s simpler tale of good versus evil.

Wicked used Oz’s whimsy and weirdness to deepen Baum’s seemingly unambiguous world, one strictly divided between right and wrong. The basic premise was a powerful one: What if the Wicked Witch of the West wasn’t so bad after all, and what if the Wizard—and the seemingly perfect society he oversaw—was the real threat? In his retelling, Maguire, an Oz fan since childhood, named Baum’s one-dimensional and green-skinned villain Elphaba Thropp; he also gave her a complicated parentage, a soapy romantic arc, and a dorm room. She attended Shiz University alongside a diverse spread of colorful, slang-talking Ozians. And, developing a darker side to Baum’s fanciful creation, Maguire also gave Elphaba a political motivation for wreaking havoc on her homeland: the oppression of its talking animals. But Maguire’s most important addition was the college friendship between Elphaba and Glinda the Good Witch (one of the Wicked Witch’s sworn enemies in Baum’s novel); the musical turns that bond into its emotional core.

[Read: Hollywood’s new crown prince of musicals]

The 2003 Broadway adaptation lent some of the Garland-led film’s sparkle to Maguire’s story and made it appropriate for an all-ages audience. By foregrounding Elphaba and Glinda’s relationship, the musical emphasized Baum’s thematic interest in friendship and self-discovery. Theatergoers could relate to Glinda’s perkiness and craving for popularity and Elphaba’s fish-out-of-water awkwardness the same way they could, in watching The Wizard of Oz or reading Baum’s novel, imagine themselves in Dorothy’s shoes, searching for home. By simplifying Maguire’s plot, the musical better captured the fairy-tale feeling of Baum’s novel. Since its opening, its appeal has proved universal—Wicked has become the second-highest-grossing Broadway musical of all time.

Its success has also translated offstage in a particularly generative fashion. Wicked is now the jumping-off point for numerous fanworks—a meta development, because the show itself is a fanwork of a fanwork. Fan fiction based on the musical has become a genre unto itself; many works imagine a queer relationship between Elphaba and Glinda. Showstoppers such as Glinda’s bubbly “Popular” and Elphaba’s anthemic “Defying Gravity” are well-orchestrated articulations of the show’s ethos, inspiring amateur and professional renditions alike. Enamored artists and theatergoers often reimagine and revisit Wicked, as do budding Broadway lovers who haven’t attended an in-person production: An abundance of bootleg recordings has made Wicked one of musical theater’s most accessible entry points. It’s also a gateway into the broader world of Oz. Wicked and its own iterations—including its long-awaited film adaptation, which has already become a cultural event—work for the same reasons Baum’s original story did: They conjure a world that is buoyant, relatable, and unforgettable.

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