HERETIC ★★★½

(MA) 112 minutes

As a Hollywood screenwriting team, Scott Beck and Bryan Woods had their first major success with the 2018 creature feature A Quiet Place, about alien monsters ready to slaughter you the moment you make a sound. Heretic, which they jointly wrote and directed, relies on the opposite gimmick: the monster is eager for conversation and the best chance of survival is to keep him talking.

At first, he doesn’t look like a monster at all. His name is Mr Reed and he’s played by Hugh Grant as the picture of harmlessness, a beaming old gent in a hideous checked cardigan and double-bridged glasses that look as if he got them long ago in England through the National Health.

When two young women come to his door to spread the word about the Church of Latter-Day Saints, he invites them in for a chinwag and a slice of the blueberry pie his wife is supposedly baking in the next room.

Is there really a pie? Does he really have a wife? These are among the questions of belief and doubt tackled in the ensuing theological wrangle between Reed and his guests, the perky yet sheltered Sister Paxton (Chloe East) and the slightly worldlier Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher).

A student of comparative religion, Reed leaps on his chance to mansplain Mormonism to the pair, who we soon discover are a captive audience in a literal sense. We also discover Reed is less a believer in any established faith than a would-be god in his own right – imposing his will on his prisoners like Jigsaw in the Saw films, if a little less gruesomely.

This is a well-acted movie all round, but primarily a vehicle for Grant – who has played his share of comic villains, but has rarely been asked to be seriously scary. Rather than dialling back his familiar mannerisms, he pushes them into grotesque caricature: Reed’s apologetic grimaces and stuttering false starts advertise a patently phony harmlessness, while the camera prowls around his cosy suburban cottage seeking clues to what lies beneath.