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?

[Read: The 15 films you should add to your watchlist this season]

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.

Nick Cave, one of the most physically expressive figures in rock and roll, was looking at me with suspicion. His eyebrows climbed the considerable expanse of his forehead; his slender frame tensed defensively in his pin-striped suit. I think he thought I was trying to get him canceled.

What I was really trying to do was get him to talk about being a man. For much of his four-decade career fronting Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Cave has seemed a bit like a drag king, exaggerating aspects of the male id to amusing and terrifying effect. He performs in funereal formal wear, sings in a growl that evokes Elvis with rabies, and writes acclaimed songs and books brimming with lust, violence, and—in recent years, as he weathered the death of two sons—pained, fatherly gravitas. His venerated stature is more akin to a knighted icon’s than a punk rocker’s; he has been awarded a badge of honor by the Australian government and a fellowship in the United Kingdom’s Royal Society of Literature, and was even invited to King Charles’s coronation, in 2023.

So when I met the 67-year-old Cave at a Manhattan hotel in August, before the release of the Bad Seeds’ 18th studio album, Wild God, I suspected that I might not be alone in wanting to hear his thoughts about the state of masculinity. Meaning: Why are guys, according to various cultural and statistical indicators, becoming lonelier and more politically extreme? I cited some lyrics from his new album that seemed to be about the way men cope with feelings of insecurity and irrelevance, hoping he would elaborate.

Between the long pauses in Cave’s reply, I could hear the crinkling leather of the oversize chair he sat in. “It may be a need that men have—maybe they’re not feeling like they are valued,” he told me, before cutting himself off. “I don’t want to come on like Jordan Peterson or something,” he said, referring to the controversial, right-leaning psychology professor and podcaster who rails against the alleged emasculating effects of modern culture.

Cave seemed taken aback by the idea that he himself was an authority on the subject. “It feels weird to think that I might be tapping into, or somehow the voice of, what it means to be a man in this world,” he told me. “I’ve never really seen that.” In fact, he said, his songs—especially his recent ones—“are very feminine in their nature.”

“I’m criticized for it, actually,” he went on. Fans write to him and say, “ ‘What’s happened to your fucking music? Grow a pair of balls, you bastard!’ ”

When Cave was 12, growing up in a rural Australian village, his father sat him down and asked him what he had done for humanity. The young Cave was mystified by the question, but his father—an English teacher with novelist ambitions—clearly wanted to pass along a drive to seek greatness, preferably through literary means. Other dads read The Hardy Boys to their kids; Cave’s regaled him with Dostoyevsky, Titus Andronicus, and … Lolita.

Those works’ linguistic elegance and thematic savagery lodged deep in Cave, but music became the medium that spoke best to his emerging point of view—that of an outsider, a bad seed, alienated from ordinary society. When he was 13, a schoolmate’s parents accused him of attempted rape after he tried to pull down their daughter’s underwear; at the school he was transferred to, he became notorious for brawling with other boys. His father’s death in a car crash when Cave was 19, and his own heroin habit at the time, didn’t help his outlook. “I was just a nasty little guy,” he told Stephen Colbert recently. His thrashing, spit-flinging band the Birthday Party earned him comparisons to Iggy Pop, but it wasn’t until he formed the Bad Seeds, in the early ’80s, that his bleak artistic vision ripened.

[Read: Nick Cave is still looking for redemption]

Blending blues, industrial rock, and cabaret into thunderous musical narratives, the Bad Seeds’ songs felt like retellings of primal fables, often warning about the mortal dangers posed by intimacy, vulnerability, and pretty girls. On the 1984 track “From Her to Eternity,” piano chords stabbed like emergency sirens as Cave moaned, “This desire to possess her is a wound.” Its final stanza implied that Cave’s narrator had killed the object of his fascination—a typically grisly outcome in Cave’s early songs. His defining classic, 1988’s “The Mercy Seat,” strapped the listener into the position of a man on death row. It plumbed another of Cave’s central themes: annihilating shame, the feeling of being judged monstrous and fearing that judgment to be true.

As Cave aged and became a father—to four sons by three different women—his vantage widened. The Bad Seeds’ 1997 album, The Boatman’s Call, a collection of stark love songs inspired by his breakup with the singer PJ Harvey, brought him new fans by recasting him as a romantic tragedian. More and more, the libidinal bite of his work seemed satirical. He formed a garage-rock band, Grinderman, whose 2007 single “No Pussy Blues” was a send-up of the mindset of those now called incels, construing sexual frustration as cosmic injustice. (Cave spat, “I sent her every type of flower / I played a guitar by the hour / I patted her revolting little Chihuahua / But still she just didn’t want to.”) In his sensationally filthy 2009 novel, The Death of Bunny Munro, he set out to illustrate the radical feminist Valerie Solanas’s appraisal that “the male is completely egocentric, trapped inside himself, incapable of empathizing or identifying with others.” (The actor Matt Smith will soon play the novel’s protagonist, an inveterate pervert, in a TV adaptation.)

But the Cave of today feels far removed from the theatrical grossness of his past, owing to personal horrors. In 2015, his 15-year-old son Arthur fell off a cliff while reportedly on LSD; in 2022, another son, Jethro, died at 31 after struggles with mental health and addiction. “I’ve had, personally, enough violence,” Cave told me. The murder ballads he once wrote were “an indulgence of someone that has yet to experience the ramifications of what violence actually has upon a person—if I’m looking at the death of my children as violent acts, which they are to some degree.”

Nick Cave and his early band the Birthday Party at the Peppermint Lounge in New York, March 26, 1983 (Michael Macioce / Getty)

Music beckoned as a means of healing. The Bad Seeds’ 2019 album, Ghosteen, was a shivery, synth-driven tone poem in which Cave tried to commune with his lost son in the afterlife; by acclamation, it’s his masterpiece. Wild God marks another sonic and temperamental reset. Its music is a luminous fusion of gospel and piano pop: more U2 than the Stooges, more New Testament than Old. Compared with his earlier work, these albums have “a more fluid, more watery sort of feel,” he said. “Which—it’s dangerous territory here—but I guess you could see as a feminine trait.”

On a level deeper than sound, Cave explained, his recent music is “feminine” because of its viewpoint. His lyrics now account not just for his own feelings, but for those of his wife, Susie, the mother of Arthur and his twin brother, Earl. In the first song on Ghosteen, for example, a woman is sitting in a kitchen, listening to music on the radio, which is exactly what Susie was doing when she learned what had happened to Arthur.

“After my son died, I had no understanding of what was going on with me at all,” Cave said. “But I could see Susie. I could see this sort of drama playing out in front of me. Drama—that sounds disparaging, but I don’t mean that. It felt like I was trying to understand what was happening to a mother who had lost her child.” His own subjectivity became “hopelessly and beautifully entangled” with hers. On Ghosteen, “it was very difficult to have a clean understanding of whose voice I actually was in some of these songs.”

That merging of perspectives reflects more than just the shared experience of suffering. It is part of what Cave sees as a transformation of his worldview—from inward-looking to outward-looking, from misanthrope to humanist. Arthur’s death made him realize that he was part of a universal experience of loss, which in turn meant that he was part of the social whole. Whereas he was once motivated to make art to impress and shock the world, he now wanted to help people, to transmute gnawing guilt into something good. “I feel that, as his father, he was my responsibility and I looked away at the wrong time, that I wasn’t sufficiently vigilant,” he said in the 2022 interview collection Faith, Hope and Carnage. He added, speaking of his and Susie’s creative output, “There is not a song or a word or a stitch of thread that is not asking for forgiveness, that is not saying we are just so sorry.”

On the Red Hand Files, the epistolary blog that Cave started in 2018, he replies to questions from the public concerning all manner of subjects: how he feels about religion (he doesn’t identify as Christian, yet he attends church every week), what he thinks of cancel culture (against it, “mercy’s antithesis”), whether he likes raisins (they have a “grim, scrotal horribleness, but like all things in this world—you, me and every other little thing—they have their place”).

At least a quarter of the messages he receives from readers express one idea—“The world is shit,” as he put it. “That has a sort of range: from people that just see everything is corrupt from a political point of view, to people that just see no value in themselves, in human beings, or in the world.” Cave recognizes that outlook from his “nasty little guy” days—but he fears that nihilism has moved from the punk fringe to the mainstream. The misery in his inbox reflects a culture that is “anti-sacred, secular by nature, unmysterious, unnuanced,” he said. He thinks music and faith offer much-needed medicine, helping to re-enchant reality.

[From the October 2024 issue: Leonard Cohen’s prophetic battle against male egoism]

Cave has been heartened to see so many people evidently feeling the same way. Back when Jordan Peterson was first making his mark as a public figure, Cave devoured his lectures about the Bible, he told me. “They were seriously beautiful things. I heard reports about people in his classes; it was like being on acid or something like that. Just listening to this man speak about these sorts of things—it was so deeply complex. And putting the idea of religion back onto the table as a legitimate intellectual concern.”

But over time, he lost interest in Peterson as he watched him get swept up in the internet’s endless, polarized culture wars. Twitter in particular, he said, has “had a terrible, diminishing effect on some great minds.”

The artist’s job, as Cave has come to see it, is to work against this erosion of ambiguity and complication, using their creative powers to push beyond reductive binaries, whether they’re applied to politics, gender, or the soul. “I’m evangelical about the transcendent nature of music itself,” he said. “We can listen to some deeply flawed individuals create the most beautiful things imaginable. The distance from what they are as human beings to what they’re capable of producing can be extraordinary.” Music, he added, can “redeem the individual.”

This redemptive spirit hums throughout Wild God. One song tells of a ghostly boy sitting at the foot of the narrator’s bed, delivering a message: “We’ve all had too much sorrow / Now is the time for joy.” The album joins in that call with its surging, uplifting sound. The final track, “As the Waters Cover the Sea,” is a straightforward hymn, suitable to be sung from the pews of even the most traditional congregations.

But the album is not entirely a departure from Cave’s old work; he has not fully evolved from “living shit-post to Hallmark card,” as he once joked in a Red Hand Files entry. “Frogs” begins with a stark reference to the tale of Cain and Abel—“Ushering in the week, he knelt down / Crushed his brother’s head in with a bone”—and builds to Cave singing, in ecstatic tones, “Kill me!” His point is that “joy is not happiness—it’s not a simple emotion,” he told me. “Joy, in its way, is a form of suffering in itself. It’s rising out of an understanding of the base nature of our lives into an explosion of something beautiful, and then a kind of retreat.”

A few songs portray an old man—or, seemingly interchangeably, an “old god” or a “wild god”—on a hallucinatory journey around the globe, lifting the spirits of the downtrodden wherever he goes. At times, the man comes off like a deluded hero, or even a problematic one: “It was rape and pillage in the retirement village / But in his mind he was a man of great virtue and courage,” Cave sings on the album’s title track. In Cave’s view, though, this figure “is a deeply sympathetic character,” he told me, a person who feels “separated from the world” and is “looking for someone that will see him of some value.”

As with Ghosteen, the album mixes Susie’s perspective with Cave’s. One song, “Conversion,” was inspired by an experience, or maybe a vision, that she had—and that she asked her husband not to publicly disclose in detail. “There is some gentle tension between my wife, who’s an extremely private person, and my own role, which is someone that pretty much speaks about pretty much everything,” Cave said.

In the song, the old god shambles around a town whose inhabitants watch him “with looks on their faces worse than grief itself”—perhaps pity, perhaps judgment. Then he sees a girl with long, dark hair. They embrace—and erupt into a cleansing flame, curing the man of his pain. As Cave described this moment in the song to me, he flared his eyes and made an explosive noise with his mouth. In my mind, I could see the old god, and he looked just like Cave.

This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “Nick Cave Wants to Be Good.”