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Immaculate opens in theaters on March 22. This review is based on a screening at the 2024 SXSW Film Festival.
Religious horror simply doesn’t have the impact it used to. Even in the 1970s, when The Exorcist scared America into believing in the Devil again, the percentage of those who claimed to be members of a place of worship was about 25 percent higher than in 2020. Neon’s new Catholic-themed horror film Immaculate recognizes this trend and uses the dissolution of our heroine’s hometown parish as motivation to move to Italy and become a nun. (Drastic, but safe measures). It even references a key factor in the loss of faith among Catholics, when Sister Gwen (Benedetta Porcaroli) asks Sister Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney) if her church closed because “the priest got into trouble.”
As pure as she is, Cecilia understands what Gwen is implying and insists that that’s not what happened, at least not in her case. The film continues to engage with the Catholic Church’s history of sexual abuse, albeit in that sideways way that horror films have to address real-life horrors. This is not a possession film, unless you consider the hijacking of reproductive freedom by patriarchal forces (see also: the 2020 HBO documentary baby god) be demonically inspired. It’s a provocative idea, but unfortunately Immaculate’s execution is as safe as it gets.
After a cold opening featuring black-clad silhouettes gliding through a misty courtyard in search of a runaway lamb, Immaculate turns her attention to Cecilia, who has just arrived at the convent of Our Lady of Sorrows hoping to promise her life to the Church. She does so under the mentorship of Father Sal Tedeschi (Álvaro Morte), a former geneticist who is too handsome to be a priest. The night of her novitiate ceremony, Cecilia tells Father Sal about a near-death experience she had when she was 12 years old; she believes God saved her for a reason and hopes to find that reason in Our Lady of Sorrows. Boy, will she ever do it.
The atmosphere in the convent is partly rustic and partly Gothic. The sisters spend their days hanging laundry and caring for the sick in a green, bucolic valley that sits atop an ancient catacomb. It’s a beautiful place, photographed with a cloudy color palette illuminated by the flickering orange flames of candles. Death is “part of everyday life” in the convent, as the stern Sister María (Simona Tabasco) tells Cecilia. That’s not enough to scare her on its own: Catholicism is a famously morbid religion, as evidenced by the sisters’ veneration of a long iron nail supposedly torn from the palm of Christ’s hand. But the screams in the courtyard and the nuns in red zentai suits should set off some alarm bells, right?
Cecilia’s slow awakening to the rather obvious truth that something sinister is happening at Our Lady of Sorrows is a major flaw in the film’s structure, which circles around for quite a while before deciding that it might as well start ratcheting up the tension. just before his climax. . During this long pause, Sweeney’s face is placid and her body language is inert; At best, her eyes fill with tears and her lips tremble, as in a scene in which her fellow nuns dress her in the vestments of the Virgin Mother for an esoteric ritual in the chapel. of the convent. She is a striking image, but her impact does not last; she does little in the first 80 minutes of this 88-minute film.
Immaculate has an outrageous ending that almost makes up for the formulaic nature of everything that precedes it, as Cecilia finally finds the courage and Sweeney begins to deliver the kind of gonzo, blood-soaked performance a film like this needs. But by then it will be too late. To that point, director Michael Mohan allows sheer volume (in the form of loud jump scares and deep, booming musical cues) to do much of the work in terms of terrifying the audience. By prioritizing these cheap thrills, he leaves behind many promising elements: a macabre setting, a rising star, an aesthetic appreciation for genre classics, old women sliding down dark hallways and making creepy dolls out of hair.