Immaculate

Directed by Michael Mohan

Running time: 1hr29 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE

Simona Tabasco and Sydney Sweeney in Immaculate

You’ll know within the first couple of minutes if Immaculate is for you or not. In the dead of night, in a creaky Italian nunnery swaddled in mist and lurid giallo lighting, a whey-faced young novice quietly steals a bunch of keys from the Mother Superior’s bedside, and makes for the imposingly locked outside gates. Fumbling to find the right key, she nearly makes her escape before a quartet of fellow sisters descends on her, silhouetted like a collective stormcloud of doom, all the white drained from their wimples.

If this image terrifies you, well, it’s a horror film, so I guess that’s all right. If it makes you cackle with delight, however, you’re in exactly the right place. Michael Mohan’s quick, nasty little convent romp has effective jump scares aplenty, a lot of grisly bodily mutilation and enough gleeful Catholic trauma-milking to get the American religious right up in arms about it, but it’s more riotous than it is frightening, and still more frightening than it is profound. I suppose you could say Immaculate queries the power we let religious institutions have over us by making a gaudy mockery of their iconography, but it’s not all that deep. Bring on the pregnant nuns who look like cheerleaders! Bring on the swarthy, lubricious priests with dark secrets! Bring on the buckets of blood, and soak them all! That’s what we’re here for, and the film is nothing if not devoutly faithful to its B-movie spirit.

If it occasionally threatens to be something more than that, that’s down to Sydney Sweeney, an actor who (as in previous Film of the Week favourite Reality) is canny both in playing to her all-American bombshell image, and upending what viewers might expect behind it. As Cecilia, a virginal Midwestern girl who turns up at said Italian convent with a fervid determination to prove her faith, she manages a fine balance between butter-wouldn’t-melt naiveté and GenZ self-possession: it’s small wonder the powers that be elect her to fall mysteriously pregnant with the second coming.

Or so everyone around her claims, and the delicate trick of Sweeney’s performance is that we’re never quite sure if Cecilia believes it herself. Either way, she grounds the escalating fire-and-brimstone daftness of Immaculate in something like emotional credibility — just enough to keep us gripped through a no-fat, in-and-out 89-minute runtime, but never so earnestly as to spoil the bloody, blasphemous fun. We don’t really believe in guilty pleasures here at Film of the Week, much less Catholic guilty pleasures. But if you do require some kind of absolution after seeing this, say three Hail Marys, and throw in a Hail Sydney for good measure.

IMMACULATE (2024) Written by Andrew Lobel | Shot by Elisha Christian | Edited by Christian Masini