LE MONDE'S OPINION - MUST SEE

It's easy enough to detect in the strategy of independent production company A24 a desire to reinvigorate a certain number of conventions, particularly those of horror cinema, to move beyond primal stimuli and the ad nauseam repetition of worn-out scenarios.

For example, recent films by Ari Aster and Ti West, produced by A24, have revealed this project of going beyond clichés and imbuing cinematic fear with a certain depth and avowed awareness, at the risk of sinking, at times, into a form of counter-productive, pretentious intellectualism. Heretic, by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, avoids this pitfall while proposing a terror device whose originality lies in the paradox of going back to the sources of a type of narrative that has nonetheless been squeezed dry by cinema.

Two young Mormon missionaries (Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East) are greeted by a courteous, debonair 50-something on a door-to-door campaign. He's played by Hugh Grant, with all the bonhomie of a former male sex symbol, now (seemingly) a couch potato. A conversation ensues in his living room with the visitors, a duel in which, with uncommon rhetorical skill, the man attempts to sway the convictions of the two proselytizers.

Though courteous, the verbal confrontation gradually darkens, and a muted threat is felt. It's in these moments, in the slow, suffocating build-up of suspense built on the imminence of a long-unidentifiable danger, that Beck and Woods's film deftly distinguishes itself. Heretic plunges into the very sources of origins of terror narratives, fairy tales themselves. It offers a kind of perverse and disturbing version (the stakes are, after all, the questioning of the existence of God) of Little Red Riding Hood, who doubles up here to face a wolf of murderous eloquence.

In its final moments, the film moves into more familiar territory, that of horrific survival, entirely focused on how the prey can, or can't, escape their fate. The plot becomes more banal. The violence is unleashed after a few furtive shots reveal the monster's true, diabolical identity.