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Hugh Grant Was Born to Play the Villain
Grant’s been terrific in recent years as characters of questionable moral standing, but his riveting turn in Heretic is something else entirely.
While Grant has done some terrific work in recent years as either villains or at least characters of questionable moral standing — think Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, The Undoing, and Paddington II — his riveting turn in Heretic is something else entirely. And the Hugh Grantisms are all still there in Heretic: the rapid blinking, denoting nervousness; the raised eyebrows suggesting intermittent helplessness; the sudden toothy smiles, attempts to break the tension. Yes, we know we’re in a horror movie, but we spend the first act of the film secretly hoping that Mr. Reed will turn out to be an okay guy, that his wife will indeed turn out to be in the next room with her blueberry pie, and that he really is curious to find out what these two smiling young women think of Mormonism — that Sister Paxton and Sister Barnes’s slowly gathering suspicions are just some kind of horrid, comical misunderstanding that will soon be cleared up.
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