Film Review: Immaculate
4 Stars
As someone whose life partner doesn’t watch horror movies, I don’t often get a chance to take in a big screen chiller. But I had plenty of motivation to head to Immaculate when it first opened.
I have known director Michael Mohan from years of working together in Los Angeles. Mohan had already impressed with a series of sharp shorts, a terrific debut feature, and two Netflix series (Everything Sucks! and The Voyeurs). With a love of personal independent stories with a comedic edge, I was curious and excited to see how he would helm a $25 million dollar budget with a very large line item for fake blood.
Partnering with Mohan on this journey was screenwriter Andrew Lovel and actress and producer Sydney Sweeney (best known for Sharp Objects, Euphoria, and The Handmaid’s Tale) in the central role of Sister Cecilia: a devout nun from Detroit who has been called to a mysterious Italian convent. Focused and selfless, Sister Cecilia welcomes her chance to serve the elder sisters who have come to the monastery at the end of their careers to be cared for. Hers is a journey of feeling chosen, and after surviving a childhood trauma, Sister Cecilia knows God has a plan for her life.
Led by the kind hand of Father Tedeschi (played with an edginess by actor Álvaro Morte), Cecilia is trained in the day-to-day work of the convent, slowly picks up some Italian, and begins to feel she’s found a new home both physically and spiritually. But it isn’t long before hints appear that not everything is not what it seems, and she finds herself unwillingly thrust into a divine psychological drama.
Cecilia is pregnant, and there is no earthly way to explain it other than the miraculous intervention of God himself. Cecilia is terrified even as the toxic patriarchy lifts her to canonized status, and she becomes the focus of intense scrutiny of her mind and body.
The convent leadership grooms her for the birth, all while it becomes clear she will never be able to leave the compound. She is trapped, out of control, and terrified. Once that central set-up is complete, Immaculate becomes free to improvise with ancient religious mythologies and cinematic nods, and the dark opera begins.
A kind of Greek chorus of terrifying nuns appear to prevent Cecilia from leaving, and she escapes into catacombs of horror that may stop you from ever taking The Village at Grand Traverse Commons tunnel tour again. Along the way, she’s forced to confront a faith that has betrayed her with evil.
With slowly built visual tension that keeps the camera moving and rolling through the candlelit shadows of the vibrant sets, Immaculate keeps you on your toes with occasional jump scares, a dreamy Renaissance aesthetic with a Lady Gaga edge, and a wonderful lead performance from Sweeney.
In that sense, it’s a classic horror experience that riffs on a large religiously-themed canon of influences. And audiences agree: Immaculate gave distributor Neon their best domestic opening weekend box office ever.
But I was most taken in by the film’s elegant simplicity as a potential allegory of the terror women must experience in real life. There is sadly no need to imagine what it could feel like to lose the agency and control of your own body, and hence your soul. Or the gut wrenching rage you could feel being used as a vehicle for someone else’s ideas of morality. In Immaculate’s shocking final moments, I possibly felt it too.
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