Heretic Ending Explained: What Did The Butterfly Mean?

What happens when you mix two Mormon missionaries, a religiously fixated sociopath, and a maze-like house together on the big screen? You get one of the best horror films in recent memory in "Heretic," a pulse-pounding experience that will keep you anxiously guessing for almost two hours and will fuel your post-movie discussions for weeks after watching. It stars Hugh Grant, Sophie Thatcher, and Chloe East, and it was written and directed by two of the people who helped create the world of "A Quiet Place," the filmmaking duo Scott Beck and Bryan Woods.

In our review of "Heretic," we praised the movie's excellent performances while pointing out that the ending might throw some viewers for a loop. The final few moments of the movie pack in a couple of big surprises and leave us with an ambiguous image that fans will probably be arguing about for years. Figuring out the real meaning behind confusing movie endings is a big part of the fun for some viewers, and we can lend a helping hand by explaining what exactly is going on in the ending of "Heretic."

The opening moments of "Heretic" introduce us to Sister Paxton (East) and Sister Barnes (Thatcher), Mormon missionaries looking to share information about God and their church. The Sisters make their way to the home of a Mr. Reed (Grant) just as a vicious storm begins rolling into town. They chain their bikes to Mr. Reed's iron fence and head up to his front door, where he invites them inside to get away from the rain.

Mr. Reed says his wife is finishing a blueberry pie and begins grilling the Sisters with questions about religion in general and their faith in particular. He ominously declares that he accidentally discovered the one true religion while doing his own research before going to check on his wife. Sister Barnes realizes that the candle Mr. Reed has been burning is blueberry pie scented, and she and Sister Paxton try to leave immediately before realizing that the front door is locked.

The Sisters head into the next room to find their coats and confront Mr. Reed. He's waiting for them in a room that looks like a cross between a library and a cult shrine. Mr. Reed tells them the door won't open until the morning, and the only way out of the house is through his basement. Two doors, one labeled belief and one labeled disbelief, lead out of the room, and Mr. Reed says he intends to test their faith.

The Sisters eventually enter Mr. Reed's basement through the belief door. It turns out both doors lead to the same room — a cement cell with a table in the center. Mr. Reed sends in a woman who he claims is his wife, and she eats a poisoned blueberry pie. Mr. Reed says in a moment he'll show the Sisters a miracle when his wife comes back to life.

Mr. Reed's wife does seemingly resurrect, and, moments later, Mr. Reed tries to convince the Sisters that they can also see God for themselves if they let him kill them. As he confronts the Sisters, Mr. Reed slashes Sister Barnes' throat, and she drops dead. Sister Paxton begins piecing together Mr. Reed's plot and realizes he faked the resurrection by using a secret door in the floor of the basement to swap out the body of his dead wife with another woman.

Sister Paxton's fears are confirmed when finds a room filled with caged women. She explains to Mr. Reed that she figured out how his religion is meant to work before stabbing him with a letter opener and running out of the room. The two come face to face again in the basement cell, but just as Mr. Reed is about to kill Sister Paxton, Sister Barnes rises off the floor and clobbers him over the head with a piece of wood. Sister Barnes then dies for real, and Sister Paxton escapes Mr. Reed's house. She thinks she sees a butterfly land on her hand, but it disappears as the movie cuts to credits.

Before we dive into the nitty gritty details about the ending of "Heretic," we need to address Mr. Reed's larger plan. At the beginning of the movie, especially if you go into it without watching any of the trailers, it seems like Mr. Reed might have genuine spiritual beliefs. There's even a sense that something supernatural might actually be happening inside his house, but that turns out to be a manipulation on the part of Mr. Reed. In reality, Mr. Reed is just a plain serial killer with an elaborate M.O. that would put the villains of the top-rated "Criminal Minds" episodes to shame.

Mr. Reed probably does have a real fixation with religious texts and imagery, but he's simply using religion as part of his plot to capture, torment, and ultimately kill women. His real game plan is to use religion to manipulate people into believing that he is some kind of all-powerful being with a connection to divine power. Mr. Reed likely thinks that devout believers like the Sisters are easy to manipulate, and he certainly seems to derive pleasure from destroying a true believer's faith.

The resurrection that occurs in Mr. Reed's basement is a pivotal moment in more ways than one. This moment is supposed to be the culmination of Mr. Reed's plan: He uses fake resurrections to convince his victims that he really does have a connection to a higher power. If everything had gone the way he intended, then one or both of the Sisters might have been willing to stay with Mr. Reed permanently — or even to let him kill them.

In the events of "Heretic," however, Mr. Reed's tried-and-tested plan went askew for the first time. The woman playing Mr. Reed's resurrected wife had a script to follow. She was supposed to say just a few words to the Sisters, giving them the impression she had seen the afterlife when she died. The woman delivered Mr. Reed's script, but she also said, "It's not real" at the end of her monologue.

Thanks to that off-script moment, both the Sisters continued to doubt Mr. Reed's story, forcing him to improvise. This is why he suddenly kills Sister Barnes and tells Sister Paxton a wild story about simulation theory to reconcile her death with his resurrection story. While the woman was simply trying to warn the girls, she inadvertently signed Sister Barnes' death warrant when she botched the resurrection, though at least it led to Sister Paxton seeing the truth and escaping from Mr. Reed.

When Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton leave Mr. Reed's living room and confront him in his chapel, they notice something pretty strange. Mr. Reed took their coats when they first arrived, and at some point he moved their bike lock key from Sister Barnes' pocket into Sister Paxton's. In that scene, the key functions as a dark confirmation that Mr. Reed has been lying to the women and setting them up for a terrible scheme. When the key reappears later in the movie, it has a completely different meaning.

Sister Paxton notices the key again after the resurrection scene in Mr. Reed's basement. Sister Barnes has just died, and Sister Paxton has crawled through the trap door in the floor and is making her way through the winding halls beneath Mr. Reed's house. She reaches a door that's been chained shut — with the bike lock that had been outside. Sister Paxton reaches into her coat for the key and realizes that Mr. Reed has carefully planned everything that led her to this very moment. From the beginning, Mr. Reed had intended on killing Sister Barnes at some stage and leaving Sister Paxton to discover these halls and this door. The off-script line from Mr. Reed's wife/prisoner kicked off Sister Paxton's suspicions, but finding the key solidified her theory that he was lying.

Seconds after finding the bike lock key in her pocket, Sister Paxton finds herself in the room where Mr. Reed keeps his prisoners. Mr. Reed asks her if she's figured out what his one true religion is, and she says yes. Sister Paxton tells Mr. Reed that his religion is control.

From the first moment that Mr. Reed appears on screen, the movie gives us hints about his true beliefs. When he's still hiding his real intentions, Mr. Reed is impeccably polite and seems to be living in a perfectly well-kept house. As his facade begins to fall apart, we see that Mr. Reed is rigidly locked into a strange set of rituals. His lights and front door are on set timers. His library and music collection is meticulously organized. He even keeps every inch of his house and its inhabitants marked on a scaled model in his office.

Mr. Reed believes in maintaining tight control over his own life, and he wants to extend that control to the lives of other people. He's become obsessed with religion because he views it as a way to control not just people's outward actions but also their inward thoughts and beliefs. Control is the only thing that Mr. Reed holds dear, and discovering this truth allows Sister Paxton to escape his grasp.

In the last scene of the movie, Mr. Reed and Sister Paxton are both bleeding out on the floor of the cell in Mr. Reed's basement. Sister Paxton starts praying, and Mr. Reed asks him to pray for her. His request might seem out of character, since we know he doesn't really believe in God, and it might even seem like a genuine empathetic moment for him — that is, if he wasn't simultaneously crawling toward Sister Paxton intending to finish her off.

This isn't really a moment of humanity coming from Mr. Reed just as his life is beginning to fade. In fact, his request is really one last desperate attempt to take control of Sister Paxton and manipulate her faith. Mr. Reed wants the satisfaction of making Sister Paxton pray for him even after everything he's done.

Of course, Sister Paxton doesn't do that. She denies Mr. Reed's request while also explaining to him that prayer has been scientifically proven to be ineffective. She says she does it for herself. In that moment, Sister Paxton isn't just resisting Mr. Reed's final attempt to control her, she's also refuting his understanding of her faith. By committing herself to the prayer, Sister Paxton is demonstrating that her faith is deeper and more powerful than Mr. Reed can truly understand.

The butterfly that Sister Paxton sees at the end of "Heretic" is probably the most confusing thing in the entire movie. When the Sisters are first speaking with Mr. Reed in his living room, they briefly discuss the possibility of reincarnation, and Sister Paxton says that she hopes she could come back to life as a butterfly to visit all the people that she loves. Of course, Sister Barnes is the one who actually dies in Mr. Reed's home, but the butterfly could represent her spirit.

If we take the butterfly to be a representation of Sister Barnes, then the ending of "Heretic" is actually kind of upbeat. Sister Paxton has managed to escape, and Sister Barnes comes to visit her one last time before moving on to whatever afterlife awaits her. The butterfly suddenly vanishing seems to be a representation of Sister Barnes' spirit moving on now that Sister Paxton is free. The entire last sequence can be read as confirmation of Sister Paxton's faith and a sure sign that everything is going to be okay.

There's more than one way to interpret the butterfly at the end of "Heretic," and not all of them are comforting: The fact that it vanishes just a moment after Sister Paxton sees it opens up the potential for darker interpretations. Sister Paxton did say she wanted to come back to life as a butterfly, so is it possible that she never made it out of Mr. Reed's basement? If we run with this interpretation, then the very last scene of the movie could actually be the filmmakers telling us that Sister Paxton didn't make it out, either.

Sister Paxton seeing this butterfly could be her realizing that she's actually dying and preparing to move on to her next life. This is a grim way to view the ending of "Heretic," but it does solve some of the problems presented by the more optimistic interpretation: After all, it's a little hard to believe that Sister Barnes survived long enough to kill Mr. Reed or to imagine that Sister Paxton solved the puzzle of the house's structure alone. It's sad, yes, but it does make a lot of sense when you look at all the evidence.

The butterfly at the end of "Heretic" might not represent Sister Barnes or Sister Paxton at all. The movie drops a few hints that point toward another possible meaning: When Mr. Reed begins his lengthy lecture on religion in his study, he brings up a Chinese philosopher called Chuang Tzu and a question he once posed about the possibility of knowing anything for certain. Chuang Tzu once had a vivid dream about being a butterfly, but after waking up he asked whether it was possible to know if he was now just a butterfly dreaming of being Chuang Tzu.

Later, Mr. Reed proposes the idea that our world is a simulation. In that moment, he's simply trying to win Sister Paxton back over after his plan went off course, but the movie's ending points back toward these two moments. The image of the butterfly and its sudden disappearance drive home the fact that we can't really know anything with 100% certainty. When you throw in the more unbelievable aspects of the ending — like Sister Barnes rising back up just in time to kill Mr. Reed before finally dying herself — the entire situation starts to seem more unreal. "It was all a dream" wouldn't make for a very satisfying ending, but "Heretic" smartly leaves that as one possible interpretation, adding a whole new layer to the ending.

If anyone can help us pin down the ending of "Heretic," it's the film's co-writers and directors. Whether or not you know their names, you're probably already familiar with the work of Scott Beck and Bryan Woods: They're the writers behind the "A Quiet Place" series of films as well as movies like "Haunt" and the dinosaur sci-fi movie "65." When Business Insider asked the directors about the butterfly that Sister Paxton sees at the end of the film, Beck admitted that it was supposed to be vague. "That's the big question, and we have no answers for that necessarily, that we want to impose on anybody else's perception," he said.

In an interview with Polygon, Beck elaborated, stating that he and Woods hoped "Heretic" would fuel intense discussions. "It's an ending by design to leave it with the audience," Beck said, adding, "The ambition is to deliver questions, and not to necessarily deliver an answer." The directors have drawn much satisfaction from the discourse surrounding the film's finale, added Woods. "What's been really engaging for us is to hear many people have multiple interpretations of what that ending means, and how that intersects with their own sense of self, and their own sense of how they view the world."

Chloe East has also opened up about the ending of "Heretic," revealing that people have reacted to it in a variety of different ways. The actor even admitted that she can't make her mind up about it herself. "I've seen the movie like four or five times now and my thoughts on the ending are always evolving and changing," she told Time magazine, adding, "There are so many polarizing opinions on it and I don't think there's a right or wrong answer."

Right now there's not much reason to think that we'll ever get a "Heretic 2." Within the world of the movie, there are certainly still questions, but there's not much fuel for another story. Mr. Reed and Sister Barnes are dead, and, depending on your interpretation of the last few scenes, Sister Paxton may be dead, too. A sequel would need to take things in a new direction, and "Heretic" didn't leave much room for that to happen.

Another bad sign for the potential "Heretic" sequel is that writer-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods are already working on their next project, a movie titled "Sovereign." On the other hand, "Heretic" had a strong showing at the box office and scored glowing reviews from critics. Beck and Woods previously worked on "A Quiet Place," which also ended with a pretty buttoned-up story, yet that movie got a sequel and a prequel (with a second sequel on the way). There's always the chance that something similar could happen with "Heretic," but we wouldn't recommend holding your breath while waiting for a follow-up.