Heretic’s directors unfold the ambiguous ending

The end of the horror film by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods Heretic comes as a surprise: it is a quiet, transcendent moment after a tense, dialogue-rich story. (End spoilers ahead, as the headline suggests.) A seemingly good-natured man, Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant), hosts two young female Mormon missionaries in his home to test their faith and explain his own. He proclaims that he is going to show them a miraculous resurrection, but his miracle turns out to be a deception and manipulation.

Mr. Reed kills one of the missionaries, Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher), but late in the film she seems to miraculously come back to life long enough to kill him and save her partner, Sister Paxton (Chloe East). The film ends with Sister Paxton fleeing 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 surprise. It is a reference to a line earlier in the film, in which Paxton said that after death she would like to come back to life 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 is not there after all. What does it mean? Polygon tapped writer-directors Bryan Woods and Scott Beck (A quiet place), who discussed their thoughts on the ending, what people might want to talk about after the movie, and how Joe Dirty helps explain it all.

(Ed. remark: This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.)

Polygon: I’m sure a lot of people will try to unpack and debate Heretic‘s last 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 it, so it doesn’t matter whether that’s objectively true or not. Can you explain what you meant by the contrast between those last two shots?

Scott Beck: Without giving our own immediate sense at this point that what you’re talking about is a reflection of the statement of faith – that’s the right place. We’ve shown the film a few times at AFI, Fantastic Fest, and Toronto, and what was really compelling for us is to hear that 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 we hear days later that they have thought about it in a different way. And that’s kind of the beauty of life for us – not being stuck in stasis, or stuck in the certainty of ‘This is the only way to see the world around me’, or in relationship or non-relationship to see with others. belief, belief, disbelief. To keep your eyes and ears open and engage with the world in a way that is both reactionary and proactive, but always a bit fluid in the way you look at the world.

Bryan Woods: It’s very difficult to talk about it because we’re making the film, we’ve been trying to put this conversation in a cinematic context for three years, and we’re shy about expressing our thoughts about what we were trying to say. Then it reduces that experience to a sound bite.

Hint: It is a design that wants to leave the ending with the audience. That’s it really. The ambition is to ask questions, and not necessarily an answer, because above all this would be a film for us to take home.

Bunch: I know there is a feeling: people get to the end and are quite curious: do we end up with belief or disbelief? Which one 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, whether it’s religion or politics or even going to the movies, this sense of, “I know what’s right.” is, and you’re wrong.” We hate that because it kills the conversation, and then dialogue is no longer possible.

Our taste varies from lowbrow films to highbrow films. We’re all over the map. I love a good lowbrow, broad comedy Joe Dirtybut if someone came to me and said, ‘I know Joe Dirty is the greatest movie of all time,” I would say, “You scare me.” That’s scary to me.

Hint: But if they said it’s the worst movie of all time, I wouldn’t agree with that either!

Bunch: That would be scary too! So then you apply that to politics, and you apply that to discourse and religion, and therein lies one of the things we’re trying to get out of this.

Hint: I feel like the internet has made people look 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 together. And that’s what I think the culture has cultivated now. And that’s a shame. And I hope there is a way to get over this hump where we currently stand as a society.

Bunch: And that is difficult, because of the digital aspect of social media. We are not present together as people. We’re on screens and we’re commentating, and it just dehumanizes the conversation. And I think that’s part of the problem.

What is the ideal way you want people to leave this film? What do you want them to talk or think about?

Hint: I hope they think about their own relationship with their ideologies. Whether it comes from an atheist perspective or one steeped in rich beliefs, I hope it is a conversation, one that reflects what Brian and I had over the past almost thirty years of friendship. Why have we come to the conclusions we have? For us, the relationship with these big existential questions is constantly evolving.

That’s the joy of life – the mysteries of life, the pursuit of questioning what’s around you, and how to be a good person, and how to interact with the world through that lens. So we hope that there will be a lot of introspection, that people can get started with it at that level.

Bunch: 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 feel to it, where it’s hard to talk about things. The internet dramatizes sides. You’re either here or you’re there, and fuck everyone else. If the reality is like this, we’re probably all somewhere on the spectrum.

And the idea of ​​having 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, that you are almost not allowed to talk about – to dramatize it to the most extreme level, so that every conversation that follows the film will be civilized and civilized. feel. hearty compared to the experience the audience has hopefully just had.

And if we can translate a cinematic conversation into a conversation people have over dinner after seeing the movie, that would be the equivalent of a home run for us. That would be really special. Even if they talk about religion for five minutes after seeing the film, that would be a gain.

Heretic is in theaters now.