Home invasion horror, like The Heretiks, has always been one of those subgenres that’s more versatile than it looks. Even setting aside that you can always change who or what is invading and who’s being invaded, it’s a form built on creative problem-solving right out there in the open, making the home at the center of it all a kind of puzzle box for both the characters and the audience.
You lock the door, but what if they come in a window? You board up the windows, but what about the attic? It’s wonderfully customizable, and it’s rooted in something to which we can all relate: A violation of the simple safety and solitude of home.
The Heretiks enters the subgenre with a clear grasp of its advantages, then twists them to meet its own needs quickly and with purpose. It’s a home invasion movie with witches, which means it gets to build its own set of rules on top of the typical scaffolding of the subgenre, then find ways to break them. That, plus a narrative that plays with our expectations while also delivering the goods in often spectacular fashion, makes for a hell of a ride and a perfect new watch for the Halloween season.
It’s Halloween night, and college dropout Ada (Josie Juliette Wert) is stuck babysitting her little sister Mabel (Ava Mae Seidensticker) and her joined-at-the-hip best friend Wesley (Luke Speakman). It wouldn’t be so bad, except that 13-year-old Mabel is determined to be as rebellious as possible, including ditching her big sister at a party when Ada bumps into her ex, Ryan (Spencer Brabham).
It’s typical sibling drama right up until it isn’t, which is when a coven of murderous witches descend on Mabel and Wesley, ready to sacrifice the kids to their dark god in a Samhain ritual that will end life as we know it.
By the time Ada realizes what’s happened, Mabel and Wesley have been herded back home by the witches’ former leader, the gruff and brutal Cai (Kimberly Epstein), the sole member of the coven who actually doesn’t want the world to end. With the help of magical barriers, the quartet manages to lock themselves inside Ada and Mabel’s house, but it’s only a matter of time before the witches outside find their way in, with blood on their minds and on their hands.
Though it’s slightly stiff as it lays out its premise, by the time it gets rolling, the script, by the Hellraiser reboot duo of Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski, falls into a winning rhythm of humor, heart, and horror that hums pleasantly along for a brisk 90 minutes. There’s a clear grasp of the concept, lots of solid interpersonal drama on which to build tension, and a nice balance of heroes and villains, with Cai in the middle as the reluctant fighter walking between two worlds.
As the standoff begins, the film lays out some very clear weapons in its witchy arsenal, from barriers drawn in blood to white powder with certain possessive powers, then finds slippery, unpredictable ways to play with those toys. Sure, some of the dialogue is a bit jarring, and occasionally Cai’s role as the resident Explainer goes a bit too far, but it’s hard to argue with the propulsive results of the plotting and the well-drawn characters.
Those characters are, of course, helped along by director Gregg Bishop (Dance of the Dead), who both keeps the narrative moving like a well-oiled machine and finds lots of ways within a relatively low budget to make The Heretiks stand out visually. I was thrilled to find that I was watching a film that does something all too rare in the occult horror space, which is to give its antagonists their own distinctive look and set of magical gifts.
Too often you see films about a coven or a cult and everyone’s in matching robes with similar hair and faces so obscured by shadow that you really can’t tell what you’re looking at. That isn’t the case here, and the title witches, led by the brutal-but-childlike Neve (Tess Williams), jump off the screen, often literally.
These elements mingle quite well together, helped along by standout performances from Epstein, Speakman, Seidensticker, and Wert, and the film’s second half just explodes with witchy fun, throwing everything from living shadows to pyrokinesis to nods in the direction of martial arts movies at the screen. That would all be cool enough, but the filmmakers take things further in the final act, ratcheting up the horror elements while also dialing in the emotional resonances at work underneath all of this supernatural action.
At its core, The Heretiks is about one group of people who believe the world deserves to end, and one group of people who believe it’s worth saving, and while that’s a very well-worn conflict on which to rest a movie, Collins and Piotrowski’s script takes that universal concept and makes it feel intimate, charged, even moving. There’s a real daring to the way it all wraps up, complete with some jaw-dropping deaths and genuine moments of catharsis, bumping The Heretiks up from a good time at the movies to a sometimes genuinely affecting one.
The Heretiks celebrated its world premiere at Fantastic Fest. Release date info coming soon.
