The Media Tourist

Hugh Grant is terrifying in his horror-movie debut as a religion-obsessed nutjob

Heretic
Starring Hugh Grant, Chloe East & Sophie Thatcher
Directed by Scott Black & Bryan Woods
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Nov. 8

A pair of earnest young Mormon missionaries gets converted to terror when they come across a strange man who tries to malevolently dismantle their faith. Hugh Grant is a horror-show hoot as the suave psychopath who traps them in a fateful game of choices, setting up a series of diabolical challenges and methodically deconstructing almost everything they once believed as truth.

A24, the studio that brought us such superb freakouts as Men, Lamb, Hereditary, Midsommar and The Witch, delivers another mind-warping detour into something unfathomably unsettling as Grant’s character—known as Mr. Reed—reveals himself as a culturally literate, religion-obsessed psychopath, trying to lead the women to “the one true religion.” And those two missionaries clearly aren’t the first to get caught in his lair…

The unsuspecting proselytizers—both of whom turn out to be more resourceful that they initially seem— are aptly played by Chole East (she was the teen crush in The Fablemans) and Sophie Thatcher (from TV’s Yellowjackets). Grant, of course, is British romcom royalty (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Sense and Sensibility, Bridget Jones’ Diary, Notting Hill), and now a new ringmaster of creepiness.  This is his first bona fide horror flick (no, I’m not counting The Lair of the White Worm, back in 1988), and he kills it as Reed’s suave, smooth, mild-mannered monstrousness unfolds with stabs of highly erudite Brit-wit humor.

Heretic is an intellectually prickly maze of a movie; its tagline is “Question Everything”— like the wooden tabletop puzzle box that hints that what we’re witnessing might be, indeed, manipulation and trickery on an even cosmic scale. The word itself stems from heresy, which means opinions contrary to orthodox religious thought. Organized religion has always looked unfavorably on heresy and heretics, which undermine the “truths” and tenets on which cathedrals, temples and mosques—and empires—are built.

The film not only dissects and dissembles religion, but takes on human existence itself, mixing in ponderables about time, prayer, prophecy, polygamy, psychology, afterlife, miracles, choices, control, board games, hope and how ideas, ideologies and even music are all just “iterations” of things that came before. (Radiohead, Lana Del Rey and Air Supply, here’s looking at you.) How do condoms, porn, Mormon “magic underwear,” butterflies and blueberry pie all figure into the plot?

You’ll find out in this impressively heady “haunted house” movie, which nods to some classic tropes while shaping everything into its own psychologically twisty Mobius Strip, where knowledge only leads to more questions. “The more you know, the less you know” Reed tells the missionaries—and believe me, that’s no comfort for them to hear.

I don’t want to spoil the surprises of Heretic, so maybe the less you know is the way to go. It’s a hellishly wild plunge into raging, slow-burn craziness—and a parable for our current age of misinformation, mistruths and outright lies in high places. There’s some spurting blood and a bit of viscera, yes, but it’s certainly no Saw; it’s smarter and more deviously disturbing than that. A white-knuckle ride that ratchets up the tension with every scene, minute by minute, it’s like a theology master class taught by a madman. It will get under your skin and into your head and stay there after it’s over.

And now, if you ever knock on a door and Hugh Grant answers, with the scent of blueberry pie wafting through the house, you might want to think twice about coming inside.

—Neil Pond

A brutal Mexican cartel boss wants to leave his old life behind—and become a trans woman—in this vibrantly saucy movie musical.

Émilia Perez
Starring  Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofia Gascón & Selena Gomez
Directed by Jacques Audiard
R

In limited theaters Friday, Nov. 1 (streaming on Netflix Nov. 13)

A fearsome Mexican cartel leader secretly longs to become a woman. A lawyer is stuck in a dead-end job prosecuting mobsters in a system totally rigged to get them off the hook. How can they help each other out?

In this vibrantly bold tale of self-identity, change, atonement and family, Zoe Saldaña (taking a break from the sky-high sci-fi worlds of Avatar and Guardians of the Galaxy) is a hardworking junior attorney who gets an offer she can’t refuse, promised unfathomable riches to help the notorious kingpin find his “real life” and leave the old one behind. Soon the legal eagle is flying all over the world to find a surgeon who’ll do the job, keep his mouth shut, and keep everything hidden from Manitas Del Monte’s wife and kids—and his old enemies.

In a bravura performance that’s already getting Oscar Best Actress buzz, real-life openly trans Spanish actress Karla Sofia Gascón plays the cartel boss as well as the transgendered woman, Émilia Perez, he exuberantly becomes. The lawyer spreads the coverup, that that the crime lord is dead. Of course, that’s not much of a stretch, in his line of work, and his wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez, below, sizzling with secrets and hidden desires of her own, gets shuttled off for her “safety” to snowy Switzerland.

But the violence of Emilia’s former life comes home to roost when Emilia reenters the world of his wife and kids, who have no idea who she really is (and used to be), and Emilia begins to shelter Jessi and raise their children in the ruse of being their aunt.

Mexican cartels, a she who was a he, a horny kinda-ex-wife and a lawyer caught in the middle…and it’s a musical! In Spanish! Characters burst into song on the streets, in their homes, everywhere. Movie musicals, of course, are nothing new. But I’d wager a Swiss bank account full of ill-gained pesos (if I had one) that next month’s big-screen Wicked adaptation won’t have a number set in a gleaming sex-change clinic, with surgeons and patients merrily crooning about chondrolaryngoplasty—Adam’s apple reduction—and the process of turning a penis into a vagina. And you won’t hear Selena Gomez, on Only Murders in the Building, purring into a phone about an intimate part of her body that, ahem, still “aches” for a former lover. (Hint: It’s not her heart.)

It’s a boldly original, invigoratingly saucy spin on a dramatically charged story with a trio of superlative leads, intermingling elements that don’t often come together on a screen—kinda like Sicario meets Mrs. Doubtfire by way of La La Land. And as Emilia becomes an advocate for victims of cartel violence—that his male counterpart certainly helped perpetuate—the movie’s tone shifts into one of heroics and reparation, signaling another kind of “transition” entirely.

When the streets of Mexico fill with people proclaiming Emilia as a sort of national icon, you can understand why—even if you don’t break into song about Adam’s apples, penises and vaginas.  

—Neil Pond

Fright-film followup expands its finely crafted creepiness into the world of a traumatized pop superstar

Smile 2
Starring Naomi Scott, Rosemarie Dewitt, Lukas Gage & Dylan Gelula
Directed by Parker Finn
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Oct. 18

A pop superstar begins having terrifying visions as she mounts an ambitious concert tour. Is she losing her mind, having alarming flashbacks from a troubled time in her life? Or is she infected by a vile demonic entity that feeds on human trauma?

If you saw the first Smile in 2022, you already know the answer. This masterfully nasty little house of horrors takes the premise of the first flick and lets it play out through a nightmarish new scenario with a troubling subtext about the high pressures—and high personal price—of fame.

As the singing superstar Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) tries to hold onto her sanity, she’s haunted by jarring memories of a horrific car crash—and freaked out by seeing people staring at her with crazed, malicious grins. Terrible things start happening around her, like the cokehead drug dealer (Euphoria’s Lukas Gage) who smashes his smiling face to a bloody pulp with a barbell weight.

It turns out the evil entity “replicates” people you know, and people you don’t, making you question reality before giving you a lethal “smile” of your own.

You never know what’s going to happen next, what’s lurking in the darkness, or when that evil grin is going to reappear. But when it does, it’s bad news. The movie mixes bloody shocks and “body horror” with the idea that witnessing, or experiencing, awful things can leave lasting impressions in your grey matter. It’s no wonder one of Skye’s hit songs is “I Want a New Brain.”

Returning director Parker Finn does another fine job of diving into the crazy swirl of this shock-filled disturbia spiked with jolting violence, jarring jump scares and the constant low hum of unbridled dread. More than once, we hear a character say, “This is f*cked up!” Indeed it is, in the way that well-crafted scary movies can really get under your skin.

Veteran actress Rosemary DeWitt plays Skye’s drill-sergeant stage mom, setting the stage for Scream 2’s return to the monstrous “mommy issues” of its predecessor. Drew Barrymore’s cameo, as the host of her real-life TV show on which Skye appears as a guest, might make you remember her breakthrough role in Scream in 1996, which is credited with revitalizing the horror-movie genre. Dylan Gelula had a freaky nocturnal encounter with Nicholas Cage in the mind-bending Dream Scenario.

But it’s Naomi Scott who channels all the horror in the mad, mad world in which her character finds herself trapped, dealing with her own toxic traumas. You may have seen the British actress singing and co-starring as Princess Jasmine alongside Will Smith in the Disney live-action remake of Aladdin back in 2019. She totally crushes her role here as a another kind of princess, a pop idol, playing stadium shows and trying to hold it together while her world tips upside down, inside out and out of control. (The movie does a great job of adding an even higher level of queasy creepiness to the often-uncomfortable encounters celebrities have with deep-dish fans.)

The movie kinda jumps the shark at the end, when it goes all-out for gross-out. But it introduces us to a new scream queen, once a Disney princess, and it reminds me of a song—the Temptations’ hit of 1971, “Smiling Faces,” in which the Motown group cautions listeners that smiling faces can mask lies. But the group probably didn’t know that, a half century later, unnerving grins can also mess you up for life…or what’s about to be left of it.

—Neil Pond

Powerful documentary about the man who embodied the iconic comic book hero in the ’70s, the tragedy that left him paralyzed, and how it made him a superhero anew

Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story
Starring Christopher Reeve
Directed by Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui
Unrated

In theaters soon

Handsome New York actor Christopher Reeve was a virtual unknown when Superman made him a movie megastar in 1978, re-introducing the iconic superhero with a grand cinematic splash to a new generation. Now this emotionally impactful documentary spotlights Reeve’s rocket ride into almost overnight fame at the age of 23, the enduring legacy of his role as the “Man of Steel” in three sequels, and when a tragic accident, less than two decades later, left him paralyzed from the neck down and altered the course of his life forever.

Breaking two vertebrae after being thrown from a horse in an equestrian event, Reeve would spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair, eventually relearning how to breathe and talk. But his story didn’t start and end with Superman, as he went on to become an undeterred advocate for disability rights, starting a foundation to raise awareness and pursue research on spinal cord injuries and paralysis.

The film’s narrative unfolds primarily through interviews with Reeve’s four now-adult children, archival footage and home movies, and conversations with his celebrity pals and the British model, Gae Exton, with whom he had a ten-year relationship before meeting and marrying his wife of 12 years, Dana. One of the most intriguing parts is the warts-and-all exploration of Reeve’s childhood in a fractured household, with an overbearing, aloof and absentee father and an absence of good examples.  

Perhaps you already know he was lifelong friends (and former roommates) with actor Robin Williams, who saw his own star rise in the ‘70s and ‘80s. The movie examines their durable relationship, and how Williams—known as a leading Hollywood funnyman—worked hard to uplift Reeve’s spirits after his debilitating injury. When his buddy was in the hospital after the accident in 1995, Williams came to visit, masking himself in surgical scrubs and schtick-ing it up as an overzealous Russian proctologist. Reeves couldn’t talk or even smile, but Williams swears he saw his blue eyes twinkle.

Reeve ultimately lost his battle with his battered body in 2004; in a cruel coda, wife Dana (a lifelong nonsmoker) succumbed to stage four lung cancer two years later. But the work of their Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation continues, driven by the passion of their children. Super/Man is a wide-arcing, soaring tribute to hope, drive, determination and dedication, and you’re a stronger, stiffer person than me if you can watch it through without feeling your eyes get a bit moist. And you’ll certainly come away with a new appreciation for an actor whose biggest feat, it turns out, wasn’t flying high up on the screen, but traveling here in the trenches of the real world, spreading a message of hope and dignity in his final role from a wheelchair, as another kind of superhero entirely.

—Neil Pond