Immaculate: A stomach-churning ride
Review Overview
Cast
8Conception
8Execution
8David Farnor | On 31, Oct 2024
Director: Michael Mohan
Cast: Sydney Sweeney, Álvaro Morte
Certificate: 18
From Anyone But You and Madame Web to Euphoria and The White Lotus, Sydney Sweeney is everywhere these days – but her best role, perhaps, is Immaculate, a horror flick that sees her disappear into a nunsploitation role with wide-eyed terror.
She plays Sister Cecilia, a young candidate who is getting thee to a nunnery in Italy. She’s devoted but naive, eager but unsure about her precise purpose in the world – and soon finds that other people have their own ideas about what that is. That central tension, between your own sense of calling and someone imposing their plan for your life, is a compelling one, and the script by Andrew Lobel fleshes it out with visceral, gory detail. Subtle, it ain’t, but there’s a surprisingly sharp point at the heart of this thriller, one that is also unabashedly about the timely – and sadly timeless – theme of female bodily autonomy.
Director Michael Mohan dives into Andrew Lobel’s script with a grisly irreverence, delivering flashes of nastiness with the lean, mean edge of the holy nail relic that’s treasured by the isolated convent. The sedate and quiet setting is repeatedly contrasted with shocking close-ups and disturbing reveals, crafting an atmosphere that’s becomes increasingly unsettling without relying solely on jump-scares.
This would all be laughably silly if it weren’t for the committed cast. Álvaro Morte is excellent as Father Sal Tedeschi, simultaneously welcoming and devout and a little bit unnerving. But it’s Sydney Sweeney who is the undoubted treasure at the heart of the story, with one sequence in the back of a car seeing her transform from fearful and desperate to steely and determined. It’s a stomach-churning ride that is wonderfully, horribly relentless.