Director: Michael Mohan
Writer: Andrew Lobel
Stars: Sydney Sweeney, Alvaro Morte, Benedetta Porcaroli
Synopsis: Cecilia, a woman of devout faith, is warmly welcomed to the picture-perfect Italian countryside, where she is offered a new role at an illustrious convent. But it becomes clear to Cecilia that her new home harbors dark and horrifying secrets.
The Immaculate Conception gets twisted in Michael Mohan’s Immaculate, his second collaboration with Sydney Sweeney after 2021’s The Voyeurs. And while it’s slightly better than that movie, there’s very little inspiration to be found in this tight but highly clichéd psychological horror film that immediately tries to find the easy way out as soon as its protagonist, Sister Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney), gets pregnant.
Cecilia has moved from the United States to Italy at the request of Father Tedeschi (Alvaro Morte), where she will take care of dying nuns while also fulfilling her vows through the tutelage of the Cardinal (Giorgio Colangeli). However, Cecilia has been experiencing strange dreams of covered nuns kidnapping her in the middle of the night in a dark room and operating on her body. But it wasn’t a dream. Something happened, and now she is expecting a child without having engaged in any form of sexual contact. The Cardinal believes she is telling the truth and brands this pregnancy a miracle – a baby conceived without sin.
If you didn’t realize that this film horrifically reinterprets the Immaculate Conception, one of the sisters tells Cecilia, “When will they start calling you Mary?” if the “without sin” line from the Cardinal didn’t make it obvious. Reinterpreting such an important part of the Bible could make for an interesting film, but Mohan is never interested in Cecilia’s connection to Catholicism, nor is he interested in the Immaculate Conception itself. He only uses it as a basis for the film’s story and fills most of the film’s 89-minute runtime with a barrage of cheap, uneventful jumpscares that are more annoying than they are scary.
The fact is, there’s nothing scary about jumpscares other than the potential jump effect you may make in your seat from hearing a higher decibel from someone screaming in your ears than the rest of the film. But there’s nothing psychologically terrifying about a random person going AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA so suddenly, especially when the convent’s atmosphere is dread-inducing front the moment Cecilia walks through the doors. More mainstream horror movies must embrace its atmosphere and create scares around that feeling instead of cheaply ‘scaring’ audiences with artificial jumpscares that are often never earned.
A terrific example of this is in Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep, one of the scariest films of the past decade, and never once uses jumpscares to ‘terrify’ its audience. Instead, Flanagan smartly creates a sense of total dread from the minute his picture begins and slowly amplifies it as the film progresses to its riveting climax, which, in turn, raises our heartbeats without us knowing.
In Immaculate, Cecilia can’t sleep at night because she may or may not see someone in her room (of course, when she turns on the lights, that someone magically disappears) and hears strange noises. That alone should be enough to sustain its atmosphere and create a sense of pure terror without any jumpscares until she learns more about the nature of her pregnancy, which, in all honesty, is incredibly ridiculous but could work if handled properly. However, since Mohan isn’t at all interested in exploring (or deconstructing) religion, the ‘reveal’ is not only haphazardly predictable but falls precipitously flat on its face as soon as it’s introduced.
It’s only in its last act that Immaculate truly comes alive in a bravura climax set in the convent’s catacombs. The location is inherently scary, and Mohan finally understands that the scares should be primarily atmospheric. He also plays with flashlights as Cecilia is pursued by the convent’s higher-ups, who believe the baby is a miracle, while Cecilia doesn’t feel physically fine. It then culminates in a thrilling one-shot where Sweeney flexes some of her most psychologically complex work yet with a final moment you may never forget.
However, this comes after consistently bludgeoning the audience’s ears with endless, thoughtless jumpscares that are designed to hide the film’s pitifully underdeveloped narrative and thematic shortcomings. Despite the festival groupthink you may have heard about the film, Immaculate is far from a nunsploitation film, and those who are saying this have clearly never seen one (Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta is the closest we’ll get to a nunsploitation film in our times). But it shouldn’t be this toothless, especially when Sweeney clearly cares about this project as its lead star and executive producer. She’s one of the most talented up-and-coming actors working today, but the films she has chosen (minus Tina Satter’s Reality and Will Gluck’s Anyone but You) have sadly not been up to par.
As a result, Immaculate is far from what its title suggests and won’t be remembered as a staple of religious horror but rather another dull jumpscare fest that apparently passes as ‘horror’ these days. Our standards seem incredibly low, which may be why horror has consistently remained Hollywood’s least interesting genre.
