Sydney Sweeney in a horror movie that tries too hard

‘Immaculate’

Fabia Lavino

When the police stop the young woman on her way to the convent in the Italian countryside, they wonder why such a person would choose to become a nun. As they rummage through her luggage (a search conducted because she has no return ticket) they ask her, in English, if joining a convent was a difficult decision. The woman examines her confused face before responding: “I don’t see it as a decision,” she says bitterly.

For Sister Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney), the American nun at the center of Michael Mohan’s bizarre cartoonish film. Immaculate, a lifelong devotion to God is the least you can do. When the young woman, who grew up outside Detroit, was a child, she drowned in a frozen pond and legally died. Paramedics revived her after she stopped breathing for seven minutes. The experience changed Cecilia, although Andrew Lobel’s script seems disinterested in the details of that profound transformation. Immaculate offers only the slightest sketch of its central character, which becomes a problem later when the stakes of his journey should seem higher.

Cecilia arrives at the Italian convent, a creepy place about which we also know very little, ready to renew her vows to God. The creepy aesthetic, along with some hostile encounters, quickly set the mood. The church sits on an isolated part of a mountainous expanse in the middle of nowhere, perpetually surrounded by a parade of gray clouds. Production designer Adam Reamer’s faithful interpretation of Catholic interiors (wood paneling, candles, and crosses adorning every wall) is quite chilling, and Francesca Maria Brunori’s costumes create an unsettling uniformity among the nuns.

A woman tells Cecilia that it is not too late to return to the United States, a comment that can be read as a helpful warning or a violent threat. But Cecila has no home to return to: her parish closed due to low attendance, leaving the nun estranged from a spiritual community. It is only vaguely indicated why she accepted the invitation to this particular convent, thousands of miles away.

Immaculate It begins as an intimately observed thriller before leaning into more appropriate B-movie horror conventions. Cecilia’s introduction to convent life is carefully wrapped up in some montages, showing her and the other nuns learning to fold laundry, care for the elderly women in the hospice program, and cleanly kill a chicken. The new nun befriends Sister Maria (The white lotus Simona Tabasco from the second season), a daring and defiant woman who joined the convent to escape an abusive relationship. Unlike Cecila, Mary is openly skeptical about what’s going on at the church, and her outburst during a crucial moment is one of the film’s few strong moments. Otherwise, Immaculate relies on jump scares to jolt the audience out of its sleep-inducing plot.

Not even Sweeney can save the movie. The actress, who also serves as a producer for her company Fifty-Fifty Films, has had an impressive run of performances as Cassie in Euphoria to her Emmy-nominated portrayal of a spoiled, monotone-voiced teenager in the first season of The white lotus. More recently, it demonstrated real scope in Realityinvesting NSA whistleblower Reality Winner with quiet strength.

It’s a shame there are only glimpses of that in Immaculate. Cecilia, whether due to the script or the performance, never turns out to be a fully coherent character. Shortly after her arrival, the nun discovers that she is pregnant: an immaculate conception considering she has never had sexual relations. Although Sweeney is more persuasive in the second half of the film, when the trauma of pregnancy turns Cecilia into an avenging nun, her character’s early sweetness and naiveté is too saccharine to follow her sudden change of personality.

Immaculate It works best when it abandons its attempts to be a kind of surrealist portrait of Catholic horror and leans into campy B-movie horror. The ridiculousness of its goriest scene, the overuse of jump scares, and the plot’s increasing lack of logic They work much better when the film doesn’t take itself too seriously. Pregnant with the second coming of Christ, Cecilia becomes desperate to understand the inner workings of the church. Her investigation leads to some disturbing discoveries, including a secret plan hatched by one of the priests (Álvaro Morte). Cecilia decides to take control of her destiny and tries to escape. A game of cat and mouse ensues, and there is a looseness to this third act that really elevates Immaculatewhich makes it easier to appreciate the film’s efforts to scare us.