When I saw the trailer for Heretic, I knew I had to see that movie.

The trailer for Heretic shows two sister missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS, or better known as Mormon) pulling their bikes up a huge flight of stairs, where they meet a potential convert who (lucky them) happens to look and sound just like the charming British romantic comedy star Hugh Grant. Unfortunately, this guy might be a psychopath.

It brought back memories for me. Not the part about the psychopath, but the part about the missionaries. I was a Mormon missionary when I was in my 20s, and I love a movie with characters I can relate to.

Will Mormons like Heretic?

As a group, Mormons (or Latter-day Saints, as we call ourselves lately) tend to be extremely sensitive about how we are portrayed in movies, and some Latter-day Saints can’t tolerate LDS characters in anything but a church promo ad. Pioneering Mormon filmmaker Richard Dutcher once said, “There’s a vocal minority who think I’m a child of Satan,” although the missionary characters in his movie, God’s Army, had an uplifting coming-of-age storyline without any lurking psychopaths around!

If Latter-day Saints of this mindset do show up at a theater to watch Heretic, they might walk out during the very first scene, when the missionaries casually chat about some borderline taboo topics that will make more prudish Latter-day Saints squirm. It’s almost as if the screenwriters are trying to say, “Look, this is definitely not a church promo ad, so if you keep watching, know that you have been warned.”

Oh yeah, and it’s rated R.

Back in the 80’s, then-president of the LDS Church Ezra Taft Benson gave a sermon to teenage boys and told them not to watch R-rated movies. It was one throw-away line in a long speech, but it caught on and ever since there has been a large contingent of church members who abstain from all R-rated movies, even as adults.

However, the first half of this movie stays pretty solidly in PG territory, and I think most LDS people, like everyone else, like to indulge in a scary movie every now and then, especially on Halloween.

Besides, most of us Latter-day Saints are so curious about what non-Mormons think of us, we’ll show up for a Mormon-centric movie even if we don’t think we’ll like it.

The makers of Heretic actually have more Mormon ties than you might expect.

Co-writers/directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods started working on Heretic before A Quiet Place made them famous. By the time they came back to it, Woods had married a Latter-day Saint, giving him a more close-up view of the faith. (Who is this LDS spouse, you may ask? Are they still married? No idea. I couldn’t find anything else anywhere about Woods’s marriage beyond the one line mention in the movie’s press kit.)

Both actors cast as missionaries in Heretic have Latter-day Saint roots.

While neither actor is currently active in the LDS Church, both were raised Mormon. At the Toronto Film Festival, Chloe East, who plays Sister Paxton, said, “So many times you see Mormon missionaries in movies as the butt of the joke, not real humans. I really wanted to represent a real sister missionary. I had friends on missions while we were shooting, and I was texting them like, ‘Is this accurate? Is this accurate? Give me a scripture to read.'”

Sophie Thatcher, who plays Sister Barnes, said “it’s been awhile” since she attended LDS church in her childhood, but added that “a lot of my family is still Mormon, so I was just asking a lot of questions.”

Oh my gosh! The fictional Mormon missionaries in Heretic seemed real.

They wore the perfect style of skirt for bike-riding and the same practical shoes I wore as a missionary, good for church or a long walk. (Or for running away from a psychopath! So much better than the stilettos horror movie victims usually wear.) I looked just like that when I was a missionary. And they sounded like missionaries, too. They knew missionary jargon and Utah slang, and they did not have a ridiculous made-up Mormon accent. (I’m looking at you, Under the Banner of Heaven.)

More than that, the relationship between the two missionaries, Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton, seemed like a real missionary relationship to me. On our missions, we’re paired with another missionary as a companion and required to stay together constantly until we are reassigned to work with someone else in a different city or neighborhood a few months later. We’re always working with people we haven’t known very long but we quickly develop a camaraderie because we spend all day everyday together. The missionaries in Heretic seemed like that: close, but also strangers. They were obviously products of the same culture, but they were also different people with distinct personalities.

When the trailer for Heretic came out, the LDS Church Newsroom cast some shade in the film’s general direction with a news release about media that “irresponsibly mischaracterize the safety and conduct of our volunteer missionaries.” Now that I’ve actually seen it, I don’t think Heretic does that. The missionary characters do behave in reasonable and safe ways, and the film shows some of the safeguards put in place by the LDS Church mission program which only fail because the villain, Mr. Reed, is an evil mastermind.

Hugh Grant plays Mr. Reed, a “cool professor” type investigator who loves to chat about religion.

“Investigator” is missionary-speak for a person who agrees to hold discussions with the missionaries. (And the writers of Heretic knew the term and used it right. Good job, writers!) Most of us missionaries worked with a few investigators like Mr. Reed during our missions (cool professors, not psychopaths). We had to find people who wanted to talk to missionaries, and so we would end up spending a disproportionate amount of time with the tiny minority of the population who thinks chatting about world religions is a fun hobby.

Mr. Reed begins his missionary discussion with as much charm as Hugh Grant in a romantic comedy, but gradually pivots toward antagonizing them with controversial but well-documented facts about Mormon history. The film does not fictionalize any of Reed’s arguments, but he does add his own spin. He then expands his argument to critique religion generally.

“We felt we needed to learn more about religion in order to catch up with Reed’s knowledge,” said Woods. “As we started writing this complex character, we realized that he’s a genius who knows more about the subject than we could ever know in our lifetime, or at least knew at the time.”

Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton sense that something is off, and not just because Mr. Reed is confronting them about their religion; that’s the sort of thing missionaries encounter all the time. Something more sinister is happening than a difference in philosophy. They try to leave, but find themselves trapped.

Some people underestimate young Mormon missionaries, but not the writers of Heretic.

Beck and Woods spent time with missionaries as they researched the script. “Sometimes you could perceive this almost surface-level naiveté in the missionaries we spent time with, which is easy to laugh at and color a certain way in the writing,” said Woods. “But we found them to be super smart and cool and even bad-ass in their views on religion, society and culture. We wove that into our characters, because what we wanted most from Paxton and Barnes was for Reed to underestimate them.”

I didn’t underestimate Sister Paxton and Sister Barnes. I knew them. They reminded me of myself when I was a young missionary, and they reminded me of other missionaries I worked with. I related to them so much, that by the time the movie climaxed, I was shaking.

No one wants to see their friends get trapped by a psychopath.