The end of the horror film by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods Heretic comes as a surprise: it’s a quiet, transcendent moment after an exciting, dialogue-heavy story. (End, spoilers ahead, as the title suggests.) A seemingly kind 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 fake and manipulated.
Mr. Reed murders one of the missionaries, Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) – but late in the film she appears to miraculously resurrect long enough to kill him and save her partner, Sister Paxton (Chloe East). The film ends with Sister Paxton escaping the house, staggering through the grounds and falling. In the penultimate shot, she sees a butterfly land on her hand and looks at it in wonder – it’s a reference to a line earlier in the film in which Paxton said that after death she would like to rise as a butterfly and visit her 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 last shot of the film shows that the butterfly isn’t there after all. What does it mean? Polygon asked writers and directors Bryan Woods and Scott Beck (A quiet place), who discussed their thoughts on the ending, what they want people to talk about after the film and how Joe Dirt 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 unpack it and discuss it HereticThe final moment. To me it felt like a statement about faith and belief – Sister Paxton believes that Sister Barnes’ spirit is with her and takes comfort in that, so it doesn’t matter whether that’s objectively true or not. Can you tell us what you meant by the contrast between the last two shots?
Scott Beck: Without expressing our own direct sense of the moment, what you’re talking about is reflecting on the statement of faith – that’s the sweet spot. We’ve screened the film a few times at AFI, at Fantastic Fest and in Toronto, and what’s really excited us is hearing that a lot of people have different interpretations of what that ending means and how that affects their own sense of self affects their own sense of how they see the world.
Sometimes we hear days later that they have changed their mind. And that for us is a kind of beauty of life – not getting stuck in stagnation or stuck in the certainty: “This is the only way to see the world around me” or seeing a relationship or non-relationship with faith, Faith, unbelief. Keep your eyes and ears open and interact with the world in ways that are both reactionary and proactive, but you are always somehow fluid in the way you see the world.
Bryan Woods: It’s very difficult to talk about because we make the film, we spend three years trying to put this conversation into a cinematic context, and we’re afraid to put forward our thoughts on what we wanted to say. Then it reduces that experience to a soundbite.
Beck: It is an ending that is meant to be left up to the audience. That’s it really. The aim is to ask questions and not necessarily provide an answer because, above all, this would be a take-away film for us.
Forest: I know there’s that feeling – people get there at the end and they’re kind of curious, are we coming out in faith or in disbelief? Which is it? That might be too binary for what we’re talking about. But one of the things that we certainly discuss in the film is a critique of certainty and a critique of – in life, be it religion, politics or even going to the movies – that sense of “I know what’s right and you know it.” .”wrong.” We hate this because it kills the conversation and then there is no more dialogue.
Our taste ranges from simple films to sophisticated films. We are all over the map. I love a good, simple, broad comedy Joe Dirtbut if someone came up to me and said, “I know that Joe Dirt “is the best movie of all time,” I would say, “you scare me.” That scares me.
Beck: But if they said it was the worst movie ever, I would disagree with that too!
Forest: That would be scary too! So you apply that to politics, and you apply it to discourse and religion, and therein lies one of the things we want to get out of this.
Beck: I feel like the internet makes people seem stupid, but that’s not the case. We are all very complex intellectual people who do not share 100% of the same views, and we cannot all be lumped into one group. And that’s what I think the culture has just cultivated. And that’s a shame. And I hope that there is a way to overcome this difficult situation that we as a society currently find ourselves in.
Forest: And that’s difficult because of the digital aspect of social media. We are not present together as people. We’re on screens commenting and it just dehumanizes the conversation. And I think that’s part of the problem.
What’s the ideal way you want people to turn people away from this film? What should they talk or think about?
Beck: I hope they think about their own relationship to their ideologies. Whether it comes from an atheist perspective or a deeply religious perspective, I hope it is a conversation, a conversation that reflects what Brian and I have had over the last nearly 30 years of our friendship. Why did we come to the conclusions we did? For us, the relationship to these big existential questions is constantly evolving.
That’s the fun of life – the mysteries of life, the pursuit of figuring out what’s around you and how to be a good person and how to interact with the world through that lens. So we hope there’s a lot of introspection and that people can engage with it on that level.
Forest: And talk about it. We’re at an interesting point in culture – certainly in American culture, but I’m sure there’s also a kind of global feeling where it’s difficult to talk about things. The Internet dramatizes sites. Either you’re here or you’re there fucking everyone else. In reality, we are probably all somewhere on the spectrum.
And the idea of being able to have a civil conversation about anything has almost completely disappeared. So one of our hopes was to dramatize a conversation about religion, something that is difficult and almost shouldn’t be talked about – to dramatize it to the most extreme level, so that every conversation that follows the film is polite and polite seems warm compared to the experience the audience hopefully just had.
And if we can translate a movie-related conversation into a conversation that people have at dinner after watching the movie, that would be the equivalent of a home run for us. That would really be something special. Even if they just talked about religion for five minutes after watching the movie, that would also be a win.
Heretic is now in the cinema.
