The directors behind 2024's Heretic finally provided an explanation for the film's wild ending.
The Hugh Grant-led A24 thriller follows a pair of young Mormon missionaries who get more than they bargained for after they are taken prisoner by a madman (played by Grant) on one of their afternoons of door-knocking.
Throughout their time in this mystery man's house, the two missionaries, Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton (Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East), have their faith questioned, leading to Heretic's bloody finale that makes even the viewer wonder if there is some kind of higher power at play in the film.
Heretic Directors Addresses the Movie's Wild Ending
Heretic directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods elaborated on what went into the movie's wild ending and why they left certain characters alive versus others.
The 2024 horror film ended in truly confounding fashion. After its pair of Mormon missionaries, Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton, realize there may be no escape from the seemingly insane Mr. Reed, things take a turn for the bloody.
Hugh Grant's skeptic slices Sister Barnes's neck with a box cutter, killing her and leaving Sister Paxton to fend for herself. Sister Paxton makes one final attempt at escape, stabbing Mr. Reed in the neck while he stabs her as well.
With Sister Paxton bleeding out, an act of God seemingly makes itself known, with Sister Barnes essentially rising from the dead, taking out Mr. Reed, and allowing Sister Paxton to make a run for it.
The movie ends with Sister Paxton on the outside looking off to the horizon as a butterfly lands on her hand. A butterfly is something that is alluded to throughout the film, with Sister Barnes saying she wants to be reincarnated as a butterfly in the afterlife.
This leaves things on an ambiguous note, as fans are left to wonder if Sister Paxton died as well and is living in some sort of idealized afterlife. If that is the case, it would leave all three of the movie's main characters left for dead whether they believed in some higher power or not (read more about the full Heretic plot here).
Directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods addressed this wild ending in a recent conversation with Fangoria.
They remarked that to them, this 'everyone is assumed to be dead' ending "[felt] inevitable" during the writing process:
"To us, it feels inevitable. Hopefully, it feels inevitable for an audience. That's inside bias. It is a discovery of what the story tells us, as we are its first audience members. That's always the fun in filmmaking for us. You don't know exactly where it is going to go. We hope that ride translates to the audience's experience."
The directing pair explained that in penning the script, they became the characters in the film, letting it unfold as they went and "[writing] from the gut:"
"Any time you have a chamber piece with a small, finite amount of people, you do those calculations. It's theme-driven, where we arrive at the end of the movie. We write from the gut and heart and put ourselves in the characters' shoes."
"The choices that appear in the script ultimately become the movie," they posited, adding that going from beat to beat became "instinctual:"
"I wouldn't necessarily say it's always preordained; the choices that appear in the script ultimately become the movie. There's a degree to which it is instinctual, and it's beholding the characters."
Beck and Woods said that just like the main characters are at the end of the movie, when writing, they were "in the basement...fighting it out:"
"When we are writing it, we are down in the basement. We are Sister Paxton. We're Sister Barnes, and we are Mr. Reed. We are fighting it out."
They even directly addressed the ambiguity of the film's skin-crawling finale.
"We love satisfying an audience...just as much as we love annoying an audience," the pair continued, closing in saying that while this movie plays with "fun payoffs," it also deals with a lot of "anti-climaxes:"
"We love satisfying an audience and giving them what they hope for and want, just as much as we love annoying an audience and giving them what they don't want. In this movie, we are playing with fun payoffs. We are also playing with a lot of anti-climaxes."
That "anti-climax" comment is a direct reference to the end of the film with the fate of Chloe East's Sister Paxton left up in the air. While fans may have wanted to see her emerge from Mr. Reed's demented theological experiment with a happy ending, that is not what they get.
Instead, viewers are forced to reckon with the idea that sometimes life's biggest questions are left unanswerable, and they just have to have blind faith that the ending is telling them that Sister Paxton is safe and sound.
These kinds of moral dilemmas are what Heretic is based around and are things its main characters themselves have to reconcile with throughout the movie.
Beck and Woods have echoed these exact sentiments elsewhere when explaining the conceit of the movie, making it clear, this was the way they wanted audiences to take it.
Shortly after the film's November 2024 release, the directing duo broke down the general theme of the Heretic's cryptic ending, noting, "Everybody kind of intuits their own relationship to faith or atheism or existentialism and the big question of what happens when we die."
Heretic is now available to stream on Max in the U.S.
