At this point, the horror genre is inundated with scary nuns, scarier churches, and even scarier devils. One thing the church hasn’t seen yet: Sydney Sweeney. Hollywood’s “It” girl of the moment leaves the romcom soaked Sydney Harbor for the chastity of the Italian Nunnery in Immaculate. Those religious vows are a lifetime commitment; Immaculate isn’t that type of committed, but it might be committed with how committed it is to it’s bit, like I was to make this last sentence work.
Sweeney plays Cecilia, a woman from Detroit who decided to commit her life to religious service. She ends up in a convent in Italy, run by Mother Superior (Dora Romano) and Father Sal Tedeschi (Alvaro Morte). After a hazy first night celebrating taking her vows, Sister Cecilia wakes up being interrogated by Cardinal Franco (Giorgio Colangeli) and the Mother and Father: despite her virginity claims, she’s found to be with child, which a certain child born in 0 AD shares certain, um similarities with.
The first 2/3 of Immaculate set the creepy atmosphere we hope we get when we go to the “horror nun” movie. The opening sequence is doing the Scream thing, showing the prison like grandeur and sinister undertones of the convent we’re about to be in. Then through each trimester of Cecilia’s pregnancy, director Michael Mohan gives us just enough insights into how deep the well of terror goes in this place. There’s just enough winking going on as well by Mohan, knowing what type of movie he’s making. The first obvious “bad guy” gets disposed of instantly for example, and this nunnery services older dementia patient nuns before they die, so Cecilia now has to worry about dozens of loopy hyper religious women who might either worship her creepily, or try to kill her due to their broken minds. Not funny, but very cleverly constructed. Lesser movies would overexplain the folklore and mythology, but Immaculate briskly gets us through the beats of these tales while still accomplishing the big goal of scaring the audience and building up suspense for the third act.
And that’s where Immaculate earns its price of admission. The final 20 minutes of this thing is wonderfully bonkers. The first bits are a wonderful, well executed homage to horror movies of the past, filled with tension and well deserved payoffs for characters and groundwork the movie did the hour before. But it’s that last 10 that will be seared into my mind for a long time. Grounding that wonderful insanity is Sweeney, shot in closeup during much of this sequence. Her years on Euphoria have prepared her to nail this ending, making you feel every bit of what she is feeling and then some. At the end, I yelled out “Oh my God!”, then collectively let out a laugh at my inadvertent pun, and the fact that I had been shocked still and finally could release my grip.
When a movie’s story can’t be new, sometimes a new actor can bring some fresh blood to the proceedings. Sydney Sweeney is proving to be a genre hopping queen, breathing new life into dormant or tired genres with her last couple films. She tried with Madame Web as well, but even an actress as popular as her can’t survive a studio waving the white flag on their film. So, let’s keep hopping Syd! Maybe do a Western? Or show up in Dune 3? Either way, sign me up, you’ve won me over even while Dakota Johnson’s mom was studying spiders in the Amazon.