Immaculate – Review

Sydney Sweeney, who sacrificed herself at the altar of Madame Web so Sony would make the hit rom-com Anyone But You, is proving that she sees her path to stardom and creative freedom. The Euphoria actress has used her clout to carve out one of the most promising careers in recent memory. Her latest achievement? Immaculate, a film that she auditioned for a decade ago and has drug through development hell to the screen because she liked the script.

It’s pretty damned good.

Directed by Sweeney’s ongoing collaborator Michael Mohan (Voyeurs, Pink Grapefruit), the film feels like a labor of love from its opening frames. Sister Mary (Simona Tobasco) has had it with whatever is up at this Italian convent. She steals the keys to the gates from the bedchamber of Mother Superior (Dora Romano) and runs away. She is pursued by four nuns, all with red cloth masks pulled over their faces and maintaining a gait studied at the school of Jason Voorhees, and cornered. Her leg is broken and poor Sister Mary is buried alive. An excellent and creepy opening that only lightly hints at what is to come.

Cut to Sister Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney), a nun invited to live at the convent after her parish in Detroit closed due to low attendance. She’s getting some side-eye from the immigration officers who see a lovely young woman marrying Christ as a waste of good flesh, but they allow her through and she heads to her convent.

The entire visual language here is, pardon the pun, immaculate. Mohan and Sweeney wanted to make a 70s-esque nunsploitation movie and they pulled that right down to the camera work. Director of photography Elisha Christian, a recurring collaborator of Sweeney and Mohan’s, seems to have pulled much of his inspiration from Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now and Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. He’s filtered it through a strange early 2000s blocking structure that creates an atmosphere of unsettling dread from the onset. It’s a lovely-looking film that allowed special effects supervisor Paolo Galiano and his crew a lot of interesting shots in which to play with their gore.

Sweeney proves game for that gore, even going so far as to demand that the cameras keep rolling despite the pain in her eyes from the fake blood. In a movie that proves to rely more on the evils of religious fanaticism and ego than it does anything truly supernatural, Galiano’s crew manages to create some of the absolute gnarliest images I’ve seen in quite some time. Faces, body parts, fingernails, all of them stand in danger and you should not grow attached to any of them as Immaculate boils to its gleefully gruesome conclusion. It’s remarkable to see and with a locked in audience produces delightful results.

This was clearly a passion project for Sydney Sweeney but I went in unsure of how I’d react to her performance. I’m not a Euphoria devotee and I’ve yet to see Anyone But You (I know, I know, I dropped the ball on that one) so I’m not really familiar with her outside of watching her career movies. This is definitely a “star-is-born” performance for me. Sweeney, who knows exactly how she’s publicly viewed and utilizes it to her advantage, is an absolute win here. Radiating silver-screen-queen energy while puking up teeth and pulling off your fingernails can’t be easy but she manages it with ease. Sometimes a chaste nun, sometimes a stunning seductress, and at times caked in blood and dirt, she doesn’t bat an eye or fumble a scene despite all that’s being thrown at her. I don’t know if everyone will be blown away by this performance but it’s one that I found to be incredible.

You get what you put into Immaculate. I loved it but there’s a solid chance some will be offended by its story and finale (those people have no insight, media literacy skills, or intelligence when it comes to watching a movie but they’re out there). Still, I urge you to give it a chance and support this wonderful little film. We need things like this in the horror movie ecosystem to come back to prominence, original IP that isn’t built on jump-scares and fountains of blood but rather dread and tone. It’s a wonderful little movie and I loved it a lot.

Immaculate is currently playing in theatres.