SXSW 2024: Immaculate
Immaculate imitates some familiar elements from religious horror films like Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen, while also trying to carve its own path. There’s not much of a plot—Sydney Sweeney plays Sister Cecilia, an American nun who joins an Italian convent after receiving an invitation from Father Tedeschi (Álvaro Morte). After just a few days, she discovers she’s pregnant. Her vow of chastity makes her pregnancy impossible, yet miraculously it happened. She becomes a saintly figure in the eyes of the priests and her fellow sisters at the convent.
For a long stretch, Immaculate is a standard horror film, one that tries to search for genuine scares and throws in jump scares to keep your attention. It’s a little boring—yes, there’s some sort of conspiracy afoot to keep Cecilia on her toes. The Italian nuns and priests speak in their native tongues as she struggles to understand the dangerous position she finds herself in.
The break-neck speed at which the story unfolds leaves very little in the way of character development. We get a scene with some quick exposition on why Cecilia became a nun. She believes in a divine power, of course, and she says she survived a near-death experience because she has a purpose. It’s that delusion that makes her an easy mark for Father Tedeschi and the rest of the convent. She buys into her “immaculate conception” at first. There’s an interesting touch of an apocalyptic tone in the film. Is this the resurrection? Or something much more sinister? Or both?
Sydney Sweeney not only stars but serves as a producer on Immaculate. The story goes she auditioned for the role years ago only to hear the production eventually fell apart. She wanted to make the film so she bought the rights under her production company and got the film back on track with her starring. If Sweeney wants to spend her time and money making films like Immaculate, I’m all in on any of her future projects. It feels like an insert-star-her horror film, but she makes it her own. She understands her appeal and her strengths as an actor—Immaculate leans into the more titillating facets of nunsploitation (mild nudity) and Sweeney embraces it: a shower scene here and a see-through gown there. If that’s what you came for, congrats. But what Sweeney manages to pull off as a performer in the second half of the film should be where the attention is focused.
Sweeney’s Cecilia becomes aware she’s a prisoner at the convent after she’s barred from visiting another doctor other than the one assigned by the priests. There’s slow-mounting paranoia that Sweeney portrays well leading up to the film’s finale. It’s similar to Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby, a film that’s a major influence on Immaculate, according to director Michael Mohan. The score by Will Bates fits the film’s tone as it matches the swing from quiet to cacophonous. There’s some restraint when it comes to the horror in the first half that falls away in the second half. Sweeney reaches incredible Final Girl heights as the film races to its bloody end. Some of what we see is truly shocking—a pull of the rug after sitting in the film’s languid pace for so long. There are some great practical gore effects, dripping in gallons of fake blood—the effect that really kicks things into high gear involves the aftermath of a suicide jumper meeting the concrete ground.
In the end, it’s the simplest of effects that’s most effective. There’s a close-up shot of Sweeney’s blood-covered, screaming face that might be the film’s best moment. The ear-piercing, guttural sound Sweeney makes matches the grim, brutal ending, one that I didn’t think the film was brazen enough to pull off. But it does.
Immaculate manages to surprise. What starts as a standard, almost dull, religious horror film, ends with a fun blood-soaked bang. Sweeney helps carry the film, not only with her star power but as a producer. Director Mohan clearly understands the genre he’s playing in, cinematographer Elisha Christian creates a grainy look that’s equal parts beautiful and eerie, and editor Christian Masini cuts it down to a tidy, easily digestible 89 minutes. For a Sydney Sweeney-produced, religious horror film set in an Italian convent, Immaculate gives us just what we want and more.
