Heretic: The plunge into seriousness

Contains spoilers

Horror is the appropriate genre for a story about two young women forced to follow the beliefs they have been professing on doorsteps.

A sly trick of the nervous system: occupying one’s awareness with the project of helping others, convincing and proselytising toward others, as a distraction from one’s own pain and uncertainty. Hoping to see one’s suppositions confirmed in the assent of other faces.

Truth is the cold water plunge to which, as thermoregulation, an individual responds “this is what is happening.” A retreat into knowledge. The person does this by saying, have you heard the good news?

Christians say it literally; others by teaching, coaching or parenthood.

Hugh Grant’s Mr Reed understands this, but remains an intellectual.

He wants to see the two women put their lives where their mouths are. And so his death is fitting. Nature, in the end, enforces seriousness, by which I mean intimacy with truth. The recurring move of the serious seeker is to flip the outward-facing lens 180 degrees.

Mr Reed tells us the ultimate religion is Control. He proclaims himself the God of this religion, and the hypothesis is subject to an experiment which runs its full course.