Impeccable Review: Sydney Sweeney’s Pregnant Nun Horror Don’t Collide in the Night

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Ecclesiastical horror Immaculate clearly wants to take a bold, principled stand in the face of religious madness and the Church’s attacks on bodily autonomy. Its heroine Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney) arrives in Italy to join a convent and take her vows of piety and celibacy, but quickly discovers that she has become pregnant – although she has never had sex.

She is pushed to the limit, physically and psychologically, just so she can transform into a vessel of unfiltered female rage. In short, it’s a film reverse-engineered from the image we have of her at the end: blood running down her face, tangling in her hair, screaming so gutturally that it could wake her entire female lineage. But his ideas are undernourished.

Cecilia finds herself adored, objectified, and controlled by the men around her, who dress her in the golden laurels and pale blue robes of the Virgin Mary. But it’s a horror movie, after all, and Immaculate thrives entirely on the idea that every strange occurrence – from the elderly nun who likes to stand in Cecilia’s bedroom doorway, to the bird that steals all of her skin in her window – are clues to ‘a larger, nefarious puzzle. Except they’re not. Most of the scenes are simply filler, old horror tropes brought out for convenience until the film’s 90 minutes are almost over and we can finally reveal the truth about poor Cecilia.

There’s at least one committed performance from Sweeney, who played a pivotal role in bringing the film to fruition. She auditioned for a version of Andrew Lobel’s script about ten years ago, before returning with her accumulated influence since Euphoria And The White Lotus to acquire the rights, retouch the script herself and hire Michael Mohan (on whom she had already collaborated) Everything is rubbish! And The Voyeurs) as a director.

Mohan and his cinematographer Elisha Christian do at least Immaculate beautiful appearance, with all that soft, natural light coming through the colonnade of the courtyard. Sometimes it hints at the beauty of Italian horror films from the ’70s. And you can see what attracted Sweeney to the project, particularly as an actor whose body became a constant topic of discussion, without apparently caring about his personality.

There is an interesting scene, early on, where Cecilia shares her childhood practice of mortifying the flesh, in which she pressed her palms on ice until the pain became unbearable. As the film progresses, we see her suffering from morning sickness. She waddles painfully from room to room. She lifts her legs in stirrups in the exam room. East Immaculate, then, trying to establish a connection between religious ideas of penance and the neglected physical sacrifices of pregnancy? If so, he makes no effort to say so. All you’re left with in the final scenes is the reminder of that other very famous pregnancy horror film, Rosemary’s baby.

That, and the fact that Sweeney – even on Euphoriaplaying a teenage girl, screaming about whether her outfit was Oklahoma!-esque “in a good way or a bad way” – handles clenched-teeth hysteria particularly well. Immaculate isn’t the right way to go, but there could be a future in the genre if she’s willing to embrace it.

Dir: Michael Mohan. With: Sydney Sweeney, Álvaro Morte, Benedetta Porcaroli, Dora Romano, Giorgio Colangeli, Simona Tabasco. 15.89 minutes.

“Immaculate” is in theaters from March 22