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.

This essay contains spoilers.

The new movie Conclave is a faithful adaptation of Robert Harris’s 2016 novel—and an absurd portrait of the Catholic Church. A thriller about the politicking that occurs when cardinals gather to elect a new pope, it depicts a clash between racist conservatives and supposedly insightful liberals who talk like a cross between an HR manual and a greeting card. Although the film’s hero describes “certainty” as the enemy, the movie has no doubt about who the bad guys are. Not even a subtle, intelligent performance from Ralph Fiennes can salvage the film’s simplistic morality.

No one expects a movie to be a doctrinal treatise, but Conclave’s blithe approach to Catholic teaching spoils the drama. The best art about the Catholic Church doesn’t necessarily endorse its tenets, but it at least takes them seriously. Novels such as Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair and Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour found tragic and comic potential in the Church’s most difficult and otherworldly teachings. They asked questions like, What if marriage really is indissoluble, and a character resolves to act accordingly? The answers were never easy, but they were always interesting. Conclave is incapable of tapping the dramatic potential of Catholic dogma, for the simple reason that the dogma it believes in is not Catholic but progressive.

Early on, we are introduced to Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), a wily Italian traditionalist who tries to persuade another cardinal to vote for him in order to prevent an African from getting elected. Tedesco, who longs for the days of the Latin Mass, naturally believes that only a European should be pope. In Conclave, racism and ritualism go together like bread and wine. In the real world, however, traditionalist Catholics have no greater friend in the highest reaches of the Church than Guinean Cardinal Robert Sarah.

[Read: Martin Scorsese’s radical act of turning theology into art]

Standing opposite Tedesco are the liberals, led by Cardinal Lawrence (Fiennes). Lawrence opens the conclave with a homily that declares, “Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance.” This claim, treated as a searing insight, does nothing to diminish the certainty of his fellow progressives. While claiming to favor “tolerating other views within our own Church,” they resolve to do everything in their power to stop Tedesco.

In one scene, Lawrence uses the sacrament of confession to extract information from a nun about a rival cardinal who had sex with her years before. Employing the sacrament for one’s own purposes, as Lawrence does, is a grave act of spiritual abuse. So is what he does next: Lawrence confronts the offending cardinal with what he has learned—thus breaking the confessional seal.

All of this could make for good drama, in a film that regarded the Catholic sacraments as capable of commanding belief. If Lawrence were genuinely Catholic, he would be racked by his conscience as he weighed his sacramental transgression against the noble aim of preventing an unworthy man from becoming pope. Instead, he intones something about his respect for the sacrament he has just violated, and moves on.

A similar flippancy emerges at the end of the film, when the newly elected Pope Innocent is revealed to be intersex. Catholic sacramental theology holds—for reasons grounded in scripture and elaborated over the course of centuries—that only a man can be ordained a priest, let alone made pope. A more interesting film might have dramatized the ironies arising from a doctrine that holds that an evil man can ascend to an office from which even the holiest woman is barred. But Conclave treats Catholic theology as mere policy, like the membership rules at Augusta National.

One effect of doctrinal limits is to constrain the powerful. If a rule is understood to have been laid down by Christ, not even a cardinal or a pope can undo it. If Catholic doctrine can change, however, the high and mighty have more freedom to remake the faith as they please—a fact that Conclave celebrates.

The film holds up Lawrence as an exemplary “manager,” as the late pope described him. Lawrence employs his procedural acumen both to enforce the rules of the conclave and to set them aside—whichever ensures the outcome he deems best. He blatantly manipulates the voting process. He digs up damaging information on leading candidates, breaking into the sealed chambers of the dead pope and violating the conclave’s ban on outside information by publicizing a dossier that swings the election. For these acts of interference, liberals praise him. “That firm hand of yours has its admirers,” a like-minded cardinal says.

If Lawrence is the image of a responsible managerial elite, his ideological opposite, Tedesco, is the ecclesial version of a conservative populist. He maintains that the Church’s leadership has fallen into lassitude and corruption since Vatican II, and his crude manners and colorful speech hint at a working-class background that he is happy to play up. (Harris’s book reports that he comes from a peasant family.)

The film explicitly proposes a parallel between sacred and secular politics, in case anyone missed the point. At one late-night meeting, a cardinal complains, “I feel as if I’m at some American political convention.” The machinations become so elaborate that another cardinal jokes that he is poised to become “the Richard Nixon of popes.” For Conclave, there is no real distinction between Church politics and electoral politics, between a Cardinal Tedesco and a Donald Trump. It’s all a power game in which anything is justified for the right cause.

[Read: The Exorcist and the lost art of Catholic storytelling]

If the movie has a saving grace, it is the way the camera admiringly lingers on the visible expressions of Catholic belief—the cassocks and tassels, the red silk and white smoke. Perhaps the most striking scene is the one in which Lawrence is carefully vested in his holy livery. These images will communicate the Church’s charisma to some viewers, despite the film’s failure to reckon with the claims that underlie the visuals.

Nonetheless, in its crude view of the Church and its lack of genuine drama, Conclave is even worse than the last great ecclesial potboiler, The Da Vinci Code. That earlier movie was pulpier, including a brief flash of a ritual sex scene. And Tom Hanks’s performance, which is probably less remembered than his hairdo, does not compare to that of Fiennes. But The Da Vinci Code was in a certain way the more intelligent film. Despite its hysterical suggestion that the Catholic Church is a grand conspiracy of albino monks and Hispanic prelates devoted to covering up the fact that Jesus fathered a child, it at least recognized that sacramental ideas, including the all-male priesthood, are central to Catholic belief. Conclave fails because it takes itself—and not its subject—seriously.

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