110 min | PG-13 | November 8, 2024 | A24
Hugh Grant plays a polite monster who traps two Mormon missionaries in his house for a theological debate that turns lethal. Grant has never been this terrifying or this entertaining.
Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton are Mormon missionaries going door to door in a Colorado suburb. They knock on the door of Mr. Reed. He is charming and intellectual and he has been expecting them. He invites them in. He offers them pie. He asks them questions about their faith. The questions become challenges. The challenges become a trap. Scott Beck and Bryan Woods construct a chamber thriller that operates as a philosophical debate for its first hour and a survival horror film for its second. The house is the film. The rooms reveal themselves as stages in an argument that Mr. Reed has been building long before the missionaries arrived.
Hugh Grant plays Mr. Reed with a warmth that makes the menace devastating. He is not a villain who announces himself. He is a host who genuinely enjoys the conversation while planning something terrible. Grant uses his charm as a weapon. The smile. The self-deprecation. The intellectual curiosity that seems so genuine until it reveals itself as a predator’s patience. This is the best performance of Grant’s career and it redefines what he is capable of. Sophie Thatcher plays Sister Barnes with an intelligence that matches Mr. Reed’s and a survival instinct that drives the film’s second half. Chloe East plays Sister Paxton with a faith that is sincere and a vulnerability that makes her the film’s emotional stakes. The three-person dynamic is calibrated with precision.
Beck and Woods wrote A Quiet Place and they understand how to use architecture as horror. The house is designed as a maze of locked doors and hidden rooms. The cinematography by Chung Chung-hoon uses the domestic space to create claustrophobia. The camera moves through hallways that feel increasingly wrong. The production design fills Mr. Reed’s house with details that reward attention. Books and board games and religious artifacts that tell you who this man is before he tells you himself. The sound design is meticulous. Every lock click and floorboard creak carries information. The score builds tension through restraint.
The film is essentially a three-hander in a single location and it works because the writing and the performances never flag. Beck and Woods take religion seriously as subject matter. Mr. Reed’s arguments against faith are not straw men. They are specific and researched and occasionally persuasive. The film does not mock the missionaries’ beliefs. It tests them. The horror emerges from the gap between intellectual argument and physical violence. Mr. Reed can dismantle a belief system with words but he needs something more brutal to prove his point. That escalation from debate to danger is the film’s central mechanism and Grant makes every stage of it compelling.