Latest Heretic trailer offers yet another reason to stay away from Hugh Grant's house

Few have made more of a meal out of their villain roles in the past decade than Hugh Grant. From Cloud Atlas, where he played so many, to Paddington 2, where he was simply too much, Grant’s villains twist that bumbling British charm into something evil. With the latest trailer for the A24 horror-thriller Heretic, we get a better look at Grant’s religious terror for the two young missionaries unlucky enough to darken his doorstep.

We’ll say this about A24: they’ve done an excellent job keeping Heretic under wraps. Based on the trailers, Grant plays Mr. Reed, a Rube Goldberg enthusiast and deadly theology dork. Though the action is staged at a quaint cottage, it’s not so different from Hansel & Gretel, with Reed as the witch in the woods. However, Mr. Reed’s mission is theological, not culinary. After trapping Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East in his labyrinth of a cottage based on the seven circles of Hell, he challenges them to a game of faith and sees how much they practice what they preach.

Heretic is the latest from Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, best known for writing A Quiet Place. But at least Heretic looks better than the duo’s last directorial effort, 65, the movie where Adam Driver crash lands on a dinosaur planet or something. Heretic does reunite Beck and Woods with Sophie Thatcher, who starred in The Boogeyman, a Stephen King adaptation that the pair also wrote. When you consider their credits, the less exciting Heretic becomes, but writer Matthew Jackson praised the film while reviewing for The A.V. Club. “Beck and Woods chose arguably the most tense topic they could find, religion, and got Hugh Grant in the midst of his Villain Era to embody the most terrifying person in any religious sphere: a man who will not shut up about his convictions,” he writes. “It’s a recipe for setting an audience on edge, and the more it simmers, the more Heretic proves itself a compelling, inventive thriller driven by three great central performances.”

Heretic opens on November 8.