Writer and director Michael Mohan was somewhat ahead of the curve in discovering the talent of Sydney Sweeney, having worked with her on Netflix series in Everything Sucks in 2018 and then casting her in his thriller The Voyeurs a few years later. Since then she has shot to stardom in hit television shows Euphoria and The White Lotus and is enjoying a purple patch on the big screen too, with the exception of the critically panned comic book flick Madame Web. In psychological horror Immaculate the filmmaker is working with his muse yet again, with Sweeney also serving as a producer on the piece.
The plot follows Sister Cecilia (Sweeney) who leaves her home in America to join a highly-regarded convent in the remote Italian countryside that provides end of life care to nuns in their final weeks. Still settling in and learning the language, she is warmly welcomed by Father Sal Tedeschi (Álvaro Morte) and Sister Gwen (Benedetta Porcaroli) but is met with a cold hostility from Sister Isabelle (Giulia Heathfield Di Renzi) who is asked to show her the ropes. After a while she falls ill and is then shocked and disturbed to learn that she is expecting a child, having never had sexual relations with a man.
Splitting the narrative into the trimesters of our protagonist’s bizarre pregnancy, the film allows us to experience the creepy developments through her perspective; the camera stalks or maybe in this case worships Cecilia, closely tracing her steps behind her and examining the all-consuming dread in her expressions with extreme close-ups as a mysterious darkness takes hold of her. Mohan is clearly playing off of themes from religious pieces of years gone by, most noticeably Roman Polanski’s 60s classic Rosemary’s Baby, but there’s a frustrating predictability to Andrew Lobel’s script as it goes on, with a lot of weight placed on cheap jump scares that are teased too obviously by the generic score.
Sweeney proved that she has the acting chops to carry a film by herself in Tina Satter’s compelling whistleblower drama Reality last year, but she has quite a bit of heavy lifting to do on this occasion. Her performance is very expressive and understated in the beginning as she naively adjusts to her new surroundings but by the third act she is forced into full-blown ‘final girl’ mode, a genre trope that she attacks with full-blooded biblical relish.
Delivered with far too much convention, Michael Mohan’s neo-nunsploitation picture Immaculate will sit quite uncomfortably in the mid-tier pew of the religious horror sub-genre, salvaged only by a second-to-nun turn from Sydney Sweeney.
Cinema Perspective 