The Heretics, 2017

The film begins with horror conventions fully intact in an intimate setting (like the rest of the film, which hardly rears its ugly, balding head, with strands of hair still sticking to the skull, out of its confined motif of a perverted deacon of the Testament of the New Ezekiel) complete to the sacrificial host tied to what appears to be planks joined or bound together with rope.

The group of masked men and women start to chant, their voices becoming louder with each proclamation of their allegiance to either Pazuzu (I am assuming since Exorcist II: The Heretic, 1977 had the Cardinal investigate the death of Father Lankester Merrin who had been killed while trying to rid Regan of the Assyrian demon Pazuzu) or Sullivan Knoth from the video game, Outlast II. You get the idea. However, director Chad Archibald does things differently, sending the viewers off on a tangent and then goes on to show, with the help of its ancillary actors, that if a woman asks you if you love her or not; would you have done this differently or would you have done that any other way to end up with her, just say yes – there is no other way. Well, perhaps there is and it’s called The Heretics.

Filmed in close quarters, the film has just enough outdoor shots to perhaps conciliate the viewing experience once it completely shifts in-doors (straight into the cabin in the woods after being in an RV in the woods), where the suspense and the bone-chilling dread are amped-up to eleven. Couple that with superior body horror and we have a picture that manages to scare with its twist of a plot.

There are no accidents seems to be the credo that director Archibald and writer Jayme Laforest seem to follow, giving their film intangible contrivance with which to first confuse then to wholeheartedly scare the good sense out of its viewers. And for some reason if the brain has started to wander, it uses the tropes and mythos of a possession narrative to forcefully grab the attention of its audience. And with its contained framing and potent use of lighting, the film becomes effective and demands that it be taken seriously, like how it treats itself; inadequate exposition waste or not, stiff performances and clunky dialogue or not. Nevertheless if the whole deal is not taken to heart it can come out as an almost winner with the body transformation, that is in tandem with the unravelling of the plot trappings. Speaking of which, while Gloria (Nina Kiri) is secured to the wall, then to the bedpost in her own predicament, the film picks pace and does not look back with one grim revelation after another forbidding divulgence being thrown at the stupefied viewers’ faces.

The opening had me convinced that The Heretics would be different in its scare-aesthetics, the second act had me convinced that the almost-deficit of a male lead in a horror film could be risque, limp insipid. It could use the Soska Sisters‘ style as a unassailable feminist pictorial trope, with its scissor and sister act; the headstrong course taken by Joan (Jorja Cadence), to conceivably rise from a certain pedestrian level from which it refuses to budge, despite the lavish make-up, the body horror, the cult back story and the fact that Gloria’s mum (Nina Richmond) is in for a double whammy of the tragic kind within a span of five, film-time, years. The film instead moves in a pattern confusing most, despite the effectively creepy moments and valuable jump scares, the white-faced demon and what have you. 

In the end, The Heretics is mostly effective in its scares with its age old (horror directors’) favourite blend of Paganism with Catholicism; where Catholicism is always shown to be less powerful than the former. Every film can’t be Constantine, 2005; they can’t all be smoking the Chinese cigarettes and consuming copious amounts of cough syrup, with its concoction of Phenylephrine HCl  and Dextromethorphan HBr and luke-warm water to submerge their feet in and go to hell.

Nonetheless, an interesting watch.