The end of Scott Beck and Bryan Woods' horror movie Heretic It is a surprise: it is a silent and transcendent moment after a tense story full of dialogue. (End of spoilers below, as the headline suggests.) A seemingly benign man, Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant), traps two young Mormon missionaries in his home to test their faith and explain his own. He proclaims that he will show them a miraculous resurrection, but his miracle turns out to be falsehood and manipulation.
Mr. Reed murders one of the missionaries, Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher), but at the end of the film, she appears to be miraculously resurrected long enough to kill him, saving her companion, Sister Paxton (Chloe East). The film ends with Sister Paxton escaping from the house, staggering across the grounds and falling. In the penultimate shot, he sees a butterfly land on his hand and looks at it in amazement; is a callback to a line earlier in the film, where Paxton said that after death, he would like to be resurrected as a butterfly, and visit his loved ones.
The implication is that she has seen the promised miracle after all and that her partner's spirit is now visiting her in a new form. But the final shot of the film shows that the butterfly isn't there after all. What does it mean? Polygon asked writer-directors Bryan Woods and Scott Beck (A quiet place), who talked about their thoughts on the ending, what they want people to talk about after the movie, and how dirt joe helps explain everything.
[Ed. note: This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.]
Photo: Kimberley French/A24 via Everett Collection
Polygon: I'm sure a lot of people will try to analyze and debate HereticThe final moment. To me, it was like a statement about faith and belief: Sister Paxton believes that Sister Barnes' spirit is with her and takes comfort in it, so it doesn't matter whether that's objectively true or not. Can you talk about what you meant with the contrast between those two final shots?
Scott Beck: Without giving our own direct feeling in the moment, what you're talking about, which is reflected in the belief statement, that's the sweet spot. We screened the film several times at AFI, Fantastic Fest, and Toronto, and what's been really interesting for us is hearing a lot of people have multiple interpretations of what that ending means and how that intersects with their own sense of self and their own sense of how they see the world.
Sometimes, days later, we hear that they have thought about it differently. And that, for us, is kind of the beauty of life: not getting stuck in stagnation or in the certainty of “this is the only way to see the world around me,” or in seeing a relationship or non-relationship. with someone faith, belief, disbelief. Keep your eyes and ears open and interact with the world in a reactionary and proactive way, but always being fluid in the way you see the world.
Bryan Woods: It's very difficult to talk about, because we make the movie, we spend three years trying to put this conversation in a cinematic context, and we're shy about expressing our thoughts about what we were trying to say. Then reduce that experience to a sound bite.
Stream: It's an ending designed to be left up to the audience. That's really all. The ambition is to raise questions, and not necessarily offer an answer, because more than anything, this for us would be a take-home film.
Forest: I know there's this feeling: people get to the end and are kind of curious: do we come out with faith or disbelief? Which is it? Which is perhaps too binary for what we're talking about. But one of the things we're certainly discussing in the film is a critique of certainty and a critique of, in life, whether it's religion or politics or even going to the movies, this feeling of, “I know what's right and you you're sure”. wrong.” We hate that, because it kills the conversation and then there is no dialogue.
Our taste ranges from vulgar films to intellectual films. We are all over the map. I love a good broad, vulgar comedy like dirt joeBut if someone came to me and said, “I know that dirt joe It’s the best movie of all time,” I was like, “You’re terrifying me.” That scares me.
Stream: But if they said it was the worst movie of all time, I wouldn't agree with that either!
Forest: That would be scary too! So you apply that to politics and you apply it to speech and religion, and therein lies one of the things we're trying to get out of this.
Forest: And it's difficult because of the digital aspect of social media. We are not present together as people. We're on screens and we're commenting, and that just dehumanizes the conversation. And I think that's part of the problem too.
What's the ideal way you want people to walk away from this movie? What do you want them to talk or think about?
Stream: I hope you are thinking about your own relationship with your ideologies. Whether it comes from an atheist perspective or a perspective steeped in rich beliefs, I hope it is a conversation, a conversation that echoes what Brian and I have had over the last almost 30 years of friendship. Why have we reached the conclusions we have? For us, the relationship with these great existential questions is constantly evolving.
That's the fun of life: the mysteries of life, the quest to question what's around you, how to be a good human being, and how to interact with the world through that lens. So we hope that there will be a lot of introspection, that people can engage in it on that level.
Forest: And talk about it. We're at an interesting point in culture, certainly American culture, but I'm sure there's also a kind of global feeling about it, where it's hard to talk about things. The Internet dramatizes the sides. You're either here or there, and screw everyone else. When the reality is that we are probably all somewhere on the spectrum.
And the idea of being able to have a civil conversation on any topic has almost completely disappeared. So one of our hopes was to dramatize a conversation about religion, something that is difficult, that is almost not supposed to be talked about; dramatize it to the most extreme level, so that any conversation that follows the film feels civil and cordial compared to the experience the audience has hopefully just had.
And if we can translate a movie conversation into a conversation that people have over dinner after seeing the movie, for us that would be the equivalent of a home run. That would be really special. Even if they only talked about religion for five minutes after watching the movie, that would be a win too.
Heretic It's already in theaters.