Immaculate – SXSW Review

Horror nun fun with a ludicrous plot twist and plenty of jump scares . This makes the most of genuine star Sydney Sweeney, but it’s really the last two minutes that rocket this movie up the must-watch list – and it has probably the ballsiest ending of any mainstream horror this year.

★★★★

Director Michael Mohan and producer/star Sydney Sweeney have delivered a superior slice of jump-scare shock-horror with Immaculate, a film that joyfully draws from the long history of woman-in-peril thrillers, pregnancy horrors and nunsploitation that came before it, while managing to stand out on its own.

Immaculate unfolds behind the locked gates of an Italian convent, where newly arrived American novice Cecilia (Sweeney) thinks she has found her calling – before she encounters a series of increasingly disturbing, sinister and possibly supernatural events. The eerie setting and the blending of religious iconography with horror elements serve as a backdrop against which to explore themes of faith, miracle versus manipulation, and the dark secrets that lie beneath the surface of a religious community.

The horror intensifies when Cecilia, despite being a virgin, discovers she is pregnant. This revelation is followed by a series of harrowing events, including attempts on her life, bizarre physical symptoms related to her pregnancy, and the uncovering of secret rooms within the convent. Meanwhile kindly patriarch Father Sal Tedeschi takes an increasingly close interest in her (Álavaro Morte, having fun in the role, is the new Hot Priest of horror).

Early on, the horor mainly comes in the form of dream sequences and jump-scares, but they’re effectively done and land with an effectiveness that many of the Conjureverse films (The Nun, the Nun II, the various Annabelles) failed to achieve. As the story continues, things get more interesting as giallo influences creep in – there are strong notes of Suspiria as Sweeney skulks around a female institution with secret rooms, maybe a touch of Mario Bava for the masked nun design, a location (Villa Parisi) previously featured in Bay of Blood and Hatchet For THe Honeymoon and an enjoyably ludicrous late-breaking, vaguely sci-fi, twist.

All of this builds to the the film’s bravura finale, possibly of the best two minutes of horror you’ll see this year. Shout out to producer/star Sydney Sweeney for signing off on this risky-yet-iconic final shot – almost certainly the ballsiest ending of any mainstream horror you’ll see this year.

Aside from the final page of the script, Sweeney is the film’s other great asset. Taking the character of Sister Cecilia from her meek, earnest introduction to her rebelliously investigatory mode all the way through the blood-spattered climax, she never hits a wrong note, and the film is solidly anchored in her performance. Mohan is smart enough to make great use of her face – her nun’s wimple frames her and draws attention to her deeply expressive eyes. Mohan knows about the power of the giallo gaze – his earlier film with Sweeney, The Voyeurs, had her burn out the eyes of her tormentors with a LASIK device, leaving them with Fulci-esque white eyeballs. Here Sweeney is both watched and watching, a doe-eyed virgin and a questioning sleuth.

When pressed on potential horror plans, Sweeney teases that her next film may be just as likely to be a musical, and that may easily be true. But she makes such a great horror heroine that it would be a shame for the genre to lose her. One of her earliest roles was to briefly play a younger version of Amber Heard’s character in John Carpenter’s final feature The Ward, and she’s been in numerous horror and thriller films since then. A number of those were, frankly not great, but as a producer she clearly has a eye for a cracking script (a feature debut from Andrew Lobel), and in Mohan she’s found a director who knows exactly how to work with her. As a result, my audience was laughing from how much they were screaming.

A glance at social media these days shows a weird objectification of Sweeney, and perhaps it’s no coincidence that Immaculate is about a woman whose body is claimed by others as a tool for their own purposes. Sweeny’s romcom Anyone But You may be doing well at the box office right now, but there’s nothing like a great horror to reclaim one’s narrative and scream back into the faces of the audience. I hope she makes many more.

Immaculate played at SXSW and is on general release in US and UK cinemas from Friday 22 March.