This fall, femmes find new ways to survive. by Suzette Smith

Much has been made of Brit cinema heartthrob Hugh Grant's heel turn in A24's suspenseful horror film Heretic. It's as if someone actually started listening to the actor, who has loudly proclaimed for decades that his bashful grimaces and hair shakes—found in iconic hits like Four Weddings and a Funeral, and Love, Actually—are just mannerisms affected for a role.

As Mr. Reed, a potential Mormon convert turned long-winded captor, Grant has found a vehicle to deploy his signature whimsical shrug under sinister circumstances, and the results are deeply creepy. Those goosebumps alone justify Heretic's ticket price, but his co-stars, who play missionaries Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East), offer strong performances of their own.

It's an almost-comical mismatch to put strong acting in a premise as belabored as what we find in Heretic. If you came for the philosophical arguments, have fun in the kiddie pool because it's not very deep. The plot is full of holes, and the existential back-and-forth between the missionaries and their captor is no more clever than those you've heard in college dorm rooms. There is an honest-to-god exploration of the similarities between Radiohead's "Creep" and "The Air That I Breathe" by the Hollies, if you haven't heard that one before.

However, while everything Mr. Reed lays forth fizzles out, the experience of listening to two sides talk past one another hits. And when one side threatens to lock the other in their basement until they either agree or die—well, that also sounds familiar.

That may explain the film's election-adjacent release date; it opened too late for a Halloween horror audience and also after November 5, when many expected widespread anxiety about religious control to drop off. And while a good amount of Heretic's success is due to A24 marketing the hell out of it, audiences may also find a catharsis therein. And the rise / return of a hero type: the Fawn Fatale.

We're all likely familiar with fight or flight, the common labels for physical responses—which are sometimes uncontrollable—caused by fear or trauma. It turns out there are more than two options. Freeze has been part of the conversation for over a century; Fawn is newer, coined by an American psychotherapist in the '00s. It describes flattering or soothing behavior towards a threat.

The Fawn Fatale is not forceful. And if she exclaims anything too loudly she will soon be corrected. In Heretic, we meet the Mormon mission partners as Paxton unselfconsciously tells Barnes about a cringe-worthy porn. Barnes wryly wonders if Paxton watches much porn, and her partner backpedals with embarrassment. Their established archetypes never waver: Barnes is wise and worldly, and she is simultaneously laughing at and shepherding Paxton through innocent, embarrassing fumbles.

When Mr. Reed's machinations later separate the two, Paxton must try to survive using her own talents. But she has little in her arsenal aside from flattery and retreat.

She admits to Mr. Reed that she isn't as smart as he is, but forthrightly declares she's still going to try to escape. Someone, ring the folksy alarm because we have a Simple Country Lawyer deploying self-deprecating charm! We won't say to what extent Paxton's stratagem succeeds, but it works for a while. And staying alive a little bit longer is at the top of Last Girl goals.

Heretic's playbook is similar to another recent release, the Netflix thriller Don't Move. Produced by Sam Rami, this film asks: What if a lady in danger just lies down for a whole movie?

Absent are the half-feral revenge mavens. Here, Iris (Kelsey Asbille) must escape a serial killer (Finn Wittrock) while she lays completely inert. Sure, he injected her with a paralyzing agent, but she's also very depressed. It's a frustrating watch, and the acting isn't great, but you can't fault the concept for exploring a lesser known fear response: freeze.

As we noted before, freeze should be a more widely-acknowledged response, since it's been observed in humans, animals, and other biological organisms for nearly as long as this theory has existed. While fight and flight get all the glory, we are firmly in the camp of whatever works. Some people work on controlling the freeze instinct. Others embrace their self-protective habit to become quiet and escape notice.

It's still a bit early to identify with certainty a deluge of mollifying, meek survivor-types working Olympic-level social gymnastics. But art imitates life, and if this is an actual trend—DIBS, I CALLED IT.

Heretic is playing in wide release, Don't Move is streaming on Netflix.

Film Review: In Heretic and Don't Move Meek Heroines Fawn and Freeze

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