Cecilia, a woman of devout faith, is warmly welcomed to the picture-perfect Italian countryside, where she is offered a new role at an illustrious convent. But it becomes clear to Cecilia that her new home harbors dark and horrifying secrets.
Sydney Sweeney seems to be on everyone’s minds these days. Between her rom-com debut in “Anyone But You” or her short dip in the Sony Spider-verse world under “Madame Web,” she’s been popping up everywhere. Alongside that reputation as the It Girl with all the cameras on her, she’s primed to pick up a role just crazy enough to counterbalance some of the Instagram attention she’s cultivated over the last several years. Enter “Immaculate,” which reads as a more austere Giallo-inspired horror film, but Sweeney does her best to honor the spirit of the project. “Immaculate” might read as a Catholic Convent “Rosemary’s Baby,” but its stylings lean directly into the pulpy atmosphere of the place and create a surprising camp effect where the audience laughed a little at the scares. This effect undermines much of the drama but leaves room for the film to feel less impactful and more… fun. It’s a movie so at odds with itself that sometimes it can feel clunky, but Sweeney’s final three minutes make for a welcome entry into the sisterhood of Final Girls that any horror aficionado would respect.
Sweeney plays Cecilia Jones, a young woman whose Church fell apart due to the general malaise of American boredom and joined a convent in the Italian countryside. As she tells us early on, she survived seven minutes of heart stoppage at a young age, and ever since then, God’s called her. When she joins the convent (at the invitation of one of the Fathers), she discovers nothing is as it seems. Instead of sisters, she finds enemies. Instead of faith she finds horror. Instead of bodily autonomy, she finds… You get the picture. When Cecilia discovers she’s pregnant, the convent’s abuzz with the news of a miracle. But is this baby the miracle she thinks it is?
Several clever decisions elevate this film above what might seem like a small-budget script. For starters the film takes place almost entirely in an actual convent with gorgeously high ceilings and sparsely decorated bedrooms. The chapels cover every square inch with solid stone and wood that feels thousands of years old. A location as prime as this gets as much glamor as possible, and it really adds to the feeling that Catholic worship services themselves have, that you’re witnessing something older than you by centuries if not millennia. If the film were to be ranked on location alone, then it succeeds. Simply throwing such a Baroque place in stark lighting makes the whole thing feel like it costs ten times more than it does. Instead, the other elements of this project force it to drag where it shouldn’t and cause us to question the terrific integrity of the piece.
There’s an idea at the core of this story that feels worth exploring, and somehow, it feels barely touched on. This convent, designed for older nuns to spend their final days, finds broken women of the cloth and helps them build meaning by assisting each other. It’s the sort of idea that sounds delightful and, when put to the test, might terrify audiences to discover that even a place as honorable as this experiences horror. Instead, we’re given a more by-the-books pregnancy story with a less-than-active protagonist who gets scared around and around until she finally does something. It’s much less of an emotional arc and much more of a plot point.
The script hews more along the lines of a smaller-budget horror film. It wants to have its gross-out gags and jump scares. So many jumps scares litter the film they lose their meaning. Only the body horror remains and, apart from yet another horrific fingernail scene, they also lose their value. As tongues get cut and feet get branded, part of me kept thinking how this simple violence against women carried no real weight other than generic pain. I kept thinking about how the bottoms of our feet are the most sensitive parts of our body and how a hot iron might be one of the most horrific pains as your entire legs clench up for hours afterward, disseminating the shock throughout your body. I thought about how pregnancies induce vomiting, and the loss of bodily autonomy to another creature is the ultimate form of submission (in this case, a nun’s submission to what could be the literal child of God). All great ideas amplify this story, but they never quite make it. Instead, the pain is simply for pain’s sake. The violence happens because it has to. Even Sydney Sweeney’s protagonist goes along with the plot until it’s too late, and she attempts a daring escape when she is nine months pregnant.
So much of this story feels like it should milk its terrific moments more. Settle into the slow-burn realization that this convent is not what it seems. Give Sweeney something to chew on rather than the bump-around-sort-of-alarmed visage she puts on. If it took half as much time for some of its best gags and used that on its slowest beats, then perhaps this whole thing might sing in supreme horror. Instead, the scenery literally saves the plot.
As for Sweeney herself, well she’s in the deep end here. No stranger to hard-acting jobs with nudity, physical demands, and even icky goo, she handles herself well under duress. It’s the quieter moments that don’t quite land. While every actor around her is giving their absolute best to menace and enthrall, she seems to tilt her head ever-so-slightly and eye whoever is explaining anything to her. Lines come out feeling stilted or soft, and I couldn’t put my finger on them until someone else explained that she was not fully committed. In the hardcore scenes (and there is one), Sweeney gives it her all. Every actor is—those scenes rule. In the softer scenes, scenes of daily life in the convent, she seems disaffected and one note. She simply hasn’t given herself over entirely to the role. This isn’t a knock on her, whether because she has too much persona to maintain as an IG It Girl or because she hasn’t expanded her acting vocabulary yet. It’s merely an attempt to highlight how this stilted performance introduces a new element into the film, making it something other than what it wants to be.
Pair an austere foreign location with gruesome body horror, a pregnancy storyline, and stilted performances, and somehow, you’ll arrive at the best of any Giallo or cult classic. Everything from this film reeks of a cult classic acolyte. Some of the best of “Suspiria” or “Rosemary’s Baby” make it into the movie but with less sheen. If the movie had rocked a deeper color palette or a more unique score, it could’ve lived in its unintended cult aesthetic. I might dismiss the film outright for merely copying its predecessors, but the last three minutes of the film bear the weight of the movie as if the director understood they’d been holding their punches and decided just to let fly the wildest right cross you’ve ever seen.
Those three minutes (maybe more, maybe less) felt like an eternity as the movie sorts out the final question. More than anything, those three minutes make the entire film feel worth it: for us, the audience, Sydney Sweeney, the writer, the director, and the crew. Done in a single take, the movie ends on a grisly note, and Sweeney deserves a spot in the Final Girl support group for giving us three-ish minutes of some gonzo-level acting. It makes up for the meandering plot and divided aesthetic. For those three minutes alone, I’d recommend this movie to horror fans (they’ll get plenty of kicks out of this) but might keep it away from other theatergoers. It drags a bit in the middle for regular audiences, but for those who know a good scare could be just around the corner, it delivers, albeit in the film’s final moments.
In Theaters Friday, March 22nd
