What is it with all these nun-related horror flicks suddenly erupting all over the place? In the last few years alone have we’ve had Prey For The Devil, Saint Maud, The Nun 2 and the nun-adjacent likes of The Pope’s Exorcist and Exorcist: Believer and not only that, but we have the seemingly nun-sentric The First Omen heading our way too – it’s a nundemic!
Sitting on the pew in amongst this plethora of religious titles is Immaculate, a movie that sees yet another idealistic young woman of the cloth suddenly having her vows horrifically tested by some supernatural force, but in a genre landscape littered with a renewed interest in religious frights, can the sight of Sydney Sweeney in a habit make it stand wimple and shoulders above the rest?
Well, with a surprising willingness to go a little further than your average Hollywood, Immaculate tries extra hard to deliver some legitimately devastating chills.
After nearly drowning after falling through ice as a child, Sister Cecilia became a woman of the cloth after deciding that God must have saved her for some sort of special purpose and a life of faith should help figure it out. We meet her as she travels to an exclusive convent in Italy that tends to dying nuns in order to take her vows. At first, there’s the usual teething issues of the language barrier and a particularly suspicious sister named Isabella, who dedicates her waking hours to flinging eye daggers at the young American whenever she can; but after befriending the English speaking Gwen, Cecilia starts to settle into her new life.
However, after handling an artifact that’s said to be one of the actual nails that was used to crucify Christ, Cecilia is taken ill and, after a medical exam, is revealed to be pregnant which immediately raises alarm bells as the young woman is still a virgin. Before you know it, Cecilia is being hailed as a potential Virgin Mary part II and is tended to at all hours of the day, but it isn’t long before Cecilia and Gwen start to think that something fishy is going on. Starting with Cecilia’s morning sickness causing her to vomit out one of her own teeth and getting ever more sinister with the discovery of crucifix shaped brands on the feet of an elderly nun, the uneasiness ramps up when a jealous Isabella tries to drown our lead while screaming that it should have been her. And if that doesn’t switch on the conspiracy theorist part of your brain, Isabella’s subsequent suicide damn well should.
Unable to leave and paranoid as all get out, Cecilia soon resorts to desperate methods in order to escape, but what is actually growing inside of her: is the last hope of mankind truly gestating within her, or is it something incredibly less idealistic?
So, with a Spoiler Warning very much in effect, I don’t think I’m suprising anyone much when I reveal that Immaculate not only has some pointed things to say about how religion has treated women over the years, but it also has some not quite subtle opinions about abortion and the sanctity of a woman’s body when it comes to her right to choose. Personally, I say bring it on, as horror is far more effective when there’s some real world politics in the fight, but also it gives things an extra edge when making the more disturbing aspects land more successfully.
However, what is surprising is that for a film that looks and sounds much like a slick – but safe – Hollywood horror film that tackles religion, director Michael Mohan and star Sydney Sweeney take their movie into extraordinary dark places during the third act that weirdly starts like The Nun 2 and ends somewhere closer to Saint Maud with its sense of unexpected rawness.
While the shift isnt exactly smooth, Immaculate manages to impress with its willingness to push the envelope to A24-style extremes in order to drive its point home.
Sweeney admittedly isn’t given much to work with other than Cecilia, as a character, has strong faith, is eager to please and has large, soulful eyes the size of snooker balls – however, when the movie requires the actress to endure Evil Dead levels of blood splatter and torment, she rises like a phoenix to greet them. While she falls a little short of Mia Goth’s haunting final grin that stretched to an eternity at the end of Pearl, or anything Morfydd Clark evoked in Saint Maud, the sight of Sweeney, coated in blood while delivering ragged birth screams directly into the camera simply has to be respected.
The other performances, while certainly right for the film, tend to lapse into stock characters for this type of movie with the token priest who seems kindly but might not be, a mother superior who knows more than she’s telling and a gutsy ally to the lead who might as well have “dead meat” tattooed on her forehead, but on the other hand, the vague unoriginality of the set-up leaves you somewhat unprepared when the really nasty shit kicks in.
Displaying a stunning lack of reverence for the church in a time when shocking cover ups have become commonplace, nothing here is sacred (ironically) and it’s underlined even further when Mohan unleashes the kind of unsettling, graphic gore that wouldn’t look out of place in a S. Craig Zahler movie that doles in crushed faces, leg breakings, a tongue removal straight out of Witchfinder General and the unorthodox severing of an umbilical chord to really throw us for a loop.
However, the movie is wise enough to never let us know what exactly the state of Cecilia’s baby actually is. Is it the second coming? Is it something far less holy? Or is it simply an unborn child caught up in fanatical practises it can’t possibly hope to control as its mother bloodily fihmhmghts to regain control of her own flesh no matter the outcome.
With a bit more back story and a better idea of who Cecilia was before she arrived, the jaw dropping final third might have carried even more weight and it’s a bit of a shame that the scares leading up to it are fairly conventional, relying a bit too much on SUDDEN LOUD NOISES to get their point across. But while there’s been better horror films of this ilk, there’s also been plenty that are worse and it displays plenty of crowd pleasing influences that includes nods to the shocking excesses of French New Wave horror and even a nod of two to Dario Argento.
Immaculate may not quite live up to its title, but a gutsy lead performance, some brutal bloodletting and an impressively spiteful final act proves that even a film that starts out as cliched as this can still turn in some truly inconceivable moments.
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