Immaculate

In the weeks leading up to Immaculate’s release, a story about Sydney Sweeney’s journey with the film had been making the rounds, acting as publicity for the film. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Sweeney had auditioned for the role an entire decade ago. The film never saw the light of day, that is, until Sweeney put her producer cap on and advocated for the film’s green light. Hats off to the PR team for peddling that story to outlets because it sparked a genuine curiosity to see what exactly about this script stuck with the Euphoria star for years. Yet, as the credits rolled, one piercing thought echoed through my head – “This is the film Sydney Sweeney fought to produce for ten years?” A film that lazily regurgitates tropes and cliches we’ve seen in the horror genre time and time again? Immaculate is like if Suspiria and Rosemary’s Baby got together and gave birth to a lifeless amalgamation devoid of anything that made those films special.

Immaculate follows Sister Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney) who, after being offered a role at an Italian convent, arrives in the foreign country to take her vows and commit herself as a servant to the Holy Spirit. Unsurprisingly, as Cecilia spends more time in the unfamiliar environment, she begins to realize that there might be something more sinister behind the religious proceedings… groundbreaking.

There is a fine line between inspiration and plagiarism, and Immaculate spends its time taking leaps and bounds over that line rather than focusing on bringing something new to the table. If you’ve seen Rosemary’s Baby, the film’s direction is quite obvious once Cecelia gets pregnant.  It’s as if screenwriter Andrew Lobel took the plot of the 1968 classic and draped it with a Christian setting. Perhaps, something new could have been extracted from the material with this religious perspective. The film never cares to dive into the complicated intricacies of religion and the burden of morality and faith and simply glosses over the hypocrisy of the Church and its treatment of women. The latter of which is only in service for a “girlboss” moment in the final act. A moment that is, once again, is direct ripoff of – you guessed it! – Rosemary’s Baby. 

As if framed for TikTok edits or Tumblr posts, Cecelia (Sweeney) encapsulates the “sad girl” aesthetic that’s only perpetuated by director Michael Mohan’s camera.

Aside from having a “reveal” – if you can even call it one – nothing is ever explained in Immaculate. All of the odd events and freak occurrences that unfurl at this convent are chalked up to “Yeah, there’s some weird shit going on here.” These weird happenstances aren’t even a far cry from your standard horror fare – creepy old lady, cult-like imagery, bird slamming into a window, lights flickering on and off to reveal a person standing in obscurity. Horror cliches aren’t necessarily a cardinal sin. The genre is built on familiarity, and fans take comfort in that. But when a film takes itself as seriously as this one, something new and forward-thinking should be brought to the table. Instead, director Michael Mohan would much rather cultivate images seemingly intended for Twitter’s “One Perfect Shot” account than create something of merit. Sure, the shots are visually appealing and capture the regality of the production design, but there’s barely any meaning or substance behind these visuals.

Maybe, just maybe, if Immaculate had characters worth rooting for or noteworthy performances, there’d be a light at the end of this tunnel, but the film even fails at that. Sydney Sweeney has turned out some great work in her career thus far as the emotionally-charged Cassie in Euphoria and the uncomfortable, awkward titular character of Reality but in Immaculate, her performance as the underdeveloped Cecelia is subpar. She spends the entire runtime delivering stilted lines of dialogue that are enough to take one out of the film, she wanders the empty halls of the convent with a deer-in-the-headlights expression and reacts unconvincingly to the perils lanced upon her. And while separate from Sweeney’s underwhelming performance, the shoddily written screenplay leaves Sister Cecelia – and every other character – as one-dimensional. Cecelia doesn’t have characterization outside of being in a freak accident years ago and wondering what her life’s purpose is. She never once grapples with her faith, she doesn’t realize that she has free will until the last 10 minutes, and she merely acts as a vehicle to propel the film forward. Sister Cecelia fails to show any evidence of having a soul aside from shedding a single tear for “the aesthetic” or letting out a blood-curdling scream in the final scene. The supporting cast is also reduced to basic archetypes – Sister Gwen (Benedetta Porcaroli) as the rebellious, lewd companion, Father Sal (Álvaro Morte) as the secretly evil and hypocritical priest, and Sister Isabelle (Giulia Heathfield Di Renzi) as the stern, rule-abiding nun.

Immaculate is anything but. With no themes to stand on or good performances to lift it from the hell its made for itself, the film conceives something worse than the Antichrist itself– a shallow film strung together with uninspired, redundant horror sequences. For the first time in cinema history, it seems that the studio executives might have been right, and denying Immaculate’s production for a decade had some logical reasoning behind it.

Verdict: Immaculate has earned itself a Nick Skip for its disinterest in bringing something new to the table while treading familiar waters.