'Immaculate' is 75% Crap, 25% Instant Camp Classic

Sydney Sweeney's new horror movie is a total bore... until the absolutely insane final act.

Immaculate is Sydney Sweeney’s third terrible movie in as many months, after Anyone But You and Madame Web. When a talented rising star keeps showing up in garbage, it’s always tempting to blame stupid movie executives, but Sweeney deserves at least some of the blame here, because she produced Immaculate and Anyone But You.

Furthermore, not only did she produce Immaculate, but she apparently pursued it hard: she apparently auditioned for the movie back in 2014 but didn’t get the role, and then, after it failed to go into production without her, circled back around to it once she had the power to do so.

It’s almost impossible to fathom what made Sweeney so passionate about this project; her role is the sort of bland, one-note character usually reserved for CW stars with no better options. One critic has compared the part to Lupita Nyong’o in Us and Toni Collette in Hereditary, and it’s my opinion that this critic is, to put it politely, out of his fucking gourd.

I say “almost impossible” because Immaculate does become incredibly entertaining in its final act, when it achieves Madame Web levels of unintentional camp (the audience with whom I saw it guffawed through multiple sequences I’m fairly certain the filmmakers did not intend to be funny); it’s structurally akin to James Wan’s Malignant, which seems like a bad movie for the majority of its running time before becoming a GREAT movie in the last half-hour. I don’t think Immaculate is as much fun as Malignant, because it doesn’t go nearly so far with its insanity as that film does… but on the other hand, Malignant is self-aware and knows that it’s camp, whereas Immaculate is trying to be a legitimately-good movie, and I recognize that disconnect will make it all the more enjoyable for some.

Directed by Michael Mohan from a screenplay by Andrew Lobel, Immaculate is about a young nun, Cecilia (Sweeney), who is assigned to a convent in rural Italy that effectively acts as a hospice for older nuns nearing the ends of their lives. The convent itself is beautiful and ornate, but its inhabitants are all so goddamn weird and/or creepy and/or outright hostile from the moment she arrives that it’s hard to believe Cecilia doesn’t get the hell out of there immediately (this is one of those horror movies, like The Nun, in which the protagonist behaves so idiotically for such a sustained period of time as to strain credulity).

But stay Cecilia does, and despite being a virgin, soon finds herself pregnant. The priests and other nuns at the convent believe this is a miracle, that Cecilia is ostensibly the new Virgin Mary, and that her baby will be the Second Coming… but Cecilia, after what seems like for-ev-er, finally comes to believe that something far more sinister is going on.

Rosemary’s Baby with an immaculate conception is a good idea for a horror movie, but Mohan and Lobel don’t know what to do with the set-up. As I said, Cecilia is a boring role, the rest of the characters never behave in a way that even remotely resembles actual human beings, the dialogue is inane (Cecilia to a priest, after being attacked in the bath: “She tried to drown me!” Priest: “That’s true.”), and any subtext about religious fundamentalism and denying women agency over their own bodies is incidental at best. The filmmakers rely on tired jump scares and liberally “borrow” from a plethora of better movies, some expected (The Omen), some less so (The Descent). It’s only 89-minutes long, and I still found it so dull that I was tempted to walk out well before the truth about what’s happening to Cecilia was revealed.

Thank Christ I didn’t - if I had, I would have missed the only part of the movie that’s any fun.

SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT

See, fairly early in the story, we learn that a) the main priest at the convent/hospice, Father Sal Tedeschi (Álvaro Morte), is a former geneticist, and b) the convent/hospice is in possession of one of the nails used to crucify Jesus. Shame on me for somehow not anticipating the bugnuts-bonkers reveal: it turns out that Father Sal has been using the DNA gathered from that nail to try and birth a new messiah. We find out that there have been many attempts at this over the years, but the babies have, up until now, always died in the womb.

Once this comes to Cecilia’s attention, she naturally tries to break out of the convent… and goes into labor in the middle of this escape attempt: she’s standing in a hallway, having just beaten an elderly nun to death with a crucifix, when her water breaks, at which point she screams, “JESUS FUCKING CHRIST!” It’s maybe the only deliberately funny joke in the whole film.

Bludgeoning a geriatric nun with a cross is only the first act of horrific violence in which Cecilia engages while trying to make her getaway - she also sets Father Sal on fire and garrotes a cardinal with his own rosary beads. When she finally does get out of the convent, she delivers the baby… tears the umbilical cord with her bare teeth… finds a nearby boulder… and drops it on her newborn child. Roll credits.

Did I not tell you that the end of this movie is a goddamn laugh riot?

Now, it’s possible that I’m wrong here, and that maybe Mohan, Lobel, and Sweeney do know how ridiculous this all is. It doesn’t play that way, though. I refer you once again to Malignant: once that movie unveils its own outrageous twist, it goes absolutely balls-to-the-wall with cartoonishly over-the-top violence that completely ignores the laws of both biology and physics. I mean, the villain cuts off one cop’s arm and then uses it to clobber another police officer over the head! It’s so CLEARLY a gag.

Immaculate could have similarly concluded with an R-rated Roadrunner and Coyote episode come to life - if Cecilia had drowned another nun in the holy water stoup, cracked skulls with a thurible, and used a monstrance as a throwing star, I’d be praising this as the best film of 2024 thus far. As it is, I think you’re probably best off waiting until the movie is on streaming and just skipping to the dénouement… and pray that if they ever make Immaculate 2, they have the sagacity to make it as unconditionally ludicrous as possible.