Have you heard the good word of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ? Sisters Barnes and Paxton (Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East, respectively) are looking to spread it, but when they knock on the door of Mr. Reed (a delightfully devilish Hugh Grant), their seemingly benign host has a religion of his own he wishes to pitch in Heretic – a horror movie for anyone who’s ever fantasized about turning the tables on door-to-door missionaries.

The Sisters arrive at the doorstep of their reclusive tormentor at a low point: Sister Paxton is still in search of her first convert, the duo has just been pranked by a group of TikTok teens who pants Paxton in search of her “magic underwear,” and a storm has just begun to break out. The rules of their church dictate that a woman must be present for the Sisters to enter Mr. Reed’s home, so to escape the rain, the two young women step inside under the promise that Mr. Reed’s wife is in the kitchen making blueberry pie. The Sisters relinquish their coats and dismiss an innocuous comment from their gracious host about the roof and walls of his home containing metal, taking a seat in the living room to begin their pitch to save Mr. Reed’s soul.

To their surprise, Mr. Reed is rather well-read on the subject of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, displaying a knowledge that not only matches but surpasses that of the two women who came to sell him on Mormonism. In response to Sister Barnes’s pamphlet full of information about the various ways Jesus shines His light in our lives, Mr. Reed drops a copy of The Book of Mormon on the coffee table that has clearly been read front to back and annotated with more sticky notes than the combined years of life between the two young missionaries. Mr. Reed grills his guests on a litany of seemingly unrelated subjects: where they’re from, their favorite fast food chains, their stance on the practice of a Mormon man taking multiple wives, and whether or not Sister Barnes has experienced a sign of her deceased father trying to communicate with her from the afterlife – one of the few tidbits of insight we get in a film that is nearly bereft of character backstory.

Despite the increasing awkwardness of their host’s probing, the Sisters maintain the same degree of cordial politeness one would expect from two worshippers of the religion that took Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s searing musical The Book of Mormon on the chin like champs. Sister Barnes, more world-weary than her bubbly counterpart, requests that Mr. Reed’s wife join them in the room, buying enough time to discuss cutting their losses on this conversion with Sister Paxton. As their host goes to the kitchen to fetch his wife (and check on that blueberry pie), the Sisters make a trio of unsettling discoveries: their phones have no service, the key to the lock securing their bikes to Mr. Reed’s front gate is in Sister Barnes’s coat pocket, and the aroma of blueberry pie filling the room is coming from a scented candle on Mr. Reed’s coffee table.

With no other choice but to push through the depths of Mr. Reed’s labyrinthine home, they arrive at a makeshift steeple complete with pews, an altar, and enough religious iconography (of all denominations) to make Ricky Gervais spontaneously combust. It is at this point that Heretic – which has already been quite a talkative chamber drama – kicks into full-on yap mode, as Hugh Grant gleefully delivers an aesthetic TED talk for the ages, dressing down every religious doctrine through a series of metaphors about the board game Monopoly and the artistic integrity of Radiohead’s “Creep.” Once Mr. Reed feels he has sufficiently proven that the religion the two girls have come to spread is a farce, all while maintaining a Mr. Rogers-esque level of politeness, he presents them with the option of leaving through the back of his house via one of two doors marked “belief” and “disbelief.”

What follows this choice is a series of twists and turns orchestrated by a man who’s ostensibly a cross between Bill Maher and John Kramer, as Mr. Reed’s end goal of the evening is to teach these two women about the “one true religion.” Grant masterfully captures the genteel sinisterism his character demands, as Mr. Reed, always ten steps ahead of his prey, operates like a spectral director guiding these women through a nihilistic play. All great debaters set traps for their opponents and catch them in the fallacies of their arguments, and Mr. Reed’s maze of a residence is this practice made manifest.

However, if you expect Heretic to have the same level of certainty about the lack of God as its antagonist, then the latest film from writing-directing duo Scott Beck and Bryan Woods – who most recently gave us the Adam Driver dinosaur vehicle 65, but are more prominently known as the original writers of A Quiet Place – will either disappoint or pleasantly surprise, depending on your religious disposition. For a theological thriller that postures as an apostate’s dream, Heretic opts for a rather ambiguous ending in the hopes that everyone goes home happy – assuming the evangelists would show up in the first place or that the moderately faithful won’t walk out once Hugh Grant bursts into his blasphemous PowerPoint presentation.

Mileage will vary with Heretic based on the viewer’s tolerance for having their beliefs challenged. My Southern Baptist programming was knee-jerking away from Heretic in fits and starts, but those incapable of enduring some religious ribbing perhaps do need to look their belief system in the mirror. The film is nowhere near as incendiary as it may appear, nor does it have any real interest in being so. At its core, this film leverages a committed performance from an acting legend – and excellent performances from two young stars – to craft a genuinely suspenseful escape room from hell. Thatcher continues to add to her scream queen résumé with yet another convincing portrait of dread, and East surprises in a role that initially feels dreadfully one-note before story developments force her to reveal more layers.

In fact, the most damning sin Beck and Woods’ latest film commits isn’t heresy but lingering. At 111 (very loquacious) minutes, Heretic doesn’t overstay its welcome so much as it demands a lot of patience from its audience. Once the plot gets rolling, this is as taut a thriller as one could hope, but the amount of table setting the film forces viewers to endure might make even the staunchest atheist pray for a savior. The only thing exacerbating the verbosity of the film is that Heretic doesn’t have anything to actually say. For those concerned, I can promise one thing: you have more conviction in the belief of your God than Heretic has that there isn’t one. As for me, seeing Hugh Grant do a Jar Jar Binks impersonation is all the proof I need.