Sydney Sweeney in Horror Film That Tries Too Hard

‘Immaculate’

Fabia Lavino

When the police cease the younger lady on her option to the convent within the Italian countryside, they surprise why such an individual would select to turn into a nun. As they rummage via her baggage — a search carried out as a result of she has no return ticket — they ask, in English, if becoming a member of a convent was a troublesome alternative. The girl scans their faces in confusion earlier than responding: “I don’t see it as a choice,” she says with bitter drive. 

For Sister Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney), the American nun on the heart of Michael Mohan’s oddly cartoonish movie Immaculate, a life-long devotion to God is the least she will be able to do. When the younger lady, who grew up outdoors of Detroit, was a toddler, she drowned in an icy pond and legally died. Paramedics revived her after she stopped respiration for seven minutes. The expertise modified Cecilia, though Andrew Lobel’s screenplay appears uninterested within the particulars of that profound transformation. Immaculate affords solely the thinnest sketch of its central character, which turns into an issue later when the stakes of her journey ought to really feel greater. 

Cecilia arrives on the Italian convent, a creepy locale about which we additionally study little or no, able to renew her vows to God. The eerie aesthetics coupled with just a few hostile encounters rapidly set the temper. The church sits in an remoted a part of a hilly expanse in the midst of nowhere, perpetually surrounded by a parade of grey clouds. Manufacturing designer Adam Reamer’s devoted rendition of Catholic interiors — wooden paneling, candle lights and crosses adorning every wall — is chilling sufficient, and Francesca Maria Brunori’s costumes create a haunting uniformity among the many nuns.

One lady tells Cecilia that it’s not too late for her to return to America — a remark that may be learn as both a useful warning or a violent menace. However there’s no house for Cecila to return to: Her parish shut down as a result of low attendance, leaving the nun unmoored from a religious group. Why she accepted the invitation to this explicit convent, 1000’s of miles away, is barely vaguely gestured at. 

Immaculate begins as an intimately noticed thriller earlier than leaning into higher suited B-movie horror conventions. Cecilia’s introduction to life on the convent is neatly wrapped into just a few montages, which present her and the opposite nuns studying to fold laundry, take care of the aged ladies within the hospice program and cleanly kill a rooster. The brand new nun turns into mates with Sister Mary (The White Lotus season two’s Simona Tabasco), a brash and defiant lady who joined the convent to flee an abusive relationship. Not like Cecila, Mary is brazenly skeptical concerning the goings-on on the church, and her outburst throughout a pivotal second is likely one of the few energetic moments of the movie. In any other case, Immaculate depends on leap scares to jolt audiences out of its slumber-inducing plot. 

Even Sweeney can’t save the movie. The actress, who additionally serves as a producer together with her firm Fifty-Fifty Movies, has had a powerful streak of performances from Cassie in Euphoria to her Emmy-nominated portrayal of a monotone-voiced, spoiled adolescent within the first season of The White Lotus. Extra just lately, she demonstrated actual vary in Actuality, investing NSA whistleblower Actuality Winner with a quiet drive.

It’s a disgrace that there are solely glimmers of that in Immaculate. Cecilia, whether or not due to the screenplay or the efficiency, by no means comes off as a completely coherent character. Quickly after her arrival, the nun finds out that she’s pregnant — an immaculate conception contemplating that she’s by no means had intercourse. Though Sweeney is extra persuasive within the latter half of the movie, when the trauma of being pregnant turns Cecilia into an avenging nun, the early sweetness and naïveté of her character is simply too cloying to trace together with her sudden character shift. 

Immaculate works finest when it abandons its makes an attempt to be a type of surrealist portrait of Catholic terror and leans into the campy horror of B motion pictures. The ridiculousness of its most gory scene, the overuse of leap scares and the rising illogic of the plot play so much higher when the film doesn’t take itself too significantly. Pregnant with the second coming of Christ, Cecilia turns into determined to know the internal workings of the church. Her investigation results in some unsettling discoveries, together with a secret plan hatched by one of many monks (Álvaro Morte). Deciding to take her future into her personal arms, Cecilia tries to flee. A sport of cat and mouse ensues, and there’s a looseness to this third act that really elevates Immaculate, making it simpler to understand the movie’s efforts to scare us.