A Girl Walks into a Nunnery: The Immaculate Review

Stop me if you've heard this one: a young woman discovers that she's pregnant due to an unknown source as her closest friends and family gaslight her into believing that everything is normal. That's the plot of Immaculate—wait, sorry, that's Rosemary's Baby. Let me try again: Two young women in a nunnery, one a naive blonde and the other a troublemaking brunette, push back against the stifling order of nuns holding them captive with strange rituals and garish, decidedly non-Catholic outfits. That's the plot of Immaculate—wait, sorry, that's Alucarda. Hold on, I can get this. A young American woman arrives in a European country to pursue her lifelong passion where she unwittingly finds that her teachers and mentors are part of a conspiracy to use her for their own sinister designs. That's the plot of Immaculate—wait, sorry, that's Suspiria, both versions.

Hang on, I just found my notes. Immaculate, which had its World Premiere at SXSW, follows Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney), an American nun who's emigrated to Italy to join a convent dedicated to caring for aging, terminally ill nuns. There she discovers that she's become pregnant from an unknown source and, encouraged by her mischievous brunette friend Gwen (Benedetta Porcaroli), attempts to figure out the source of the conspiracy around her, even as she's worshiped as a Virgin Mary for a new age. 

 In the Q&A following the film, star and producer Sydney Sweeney said she'd been attempting to get the film made after first auditioning for it over 10 years before. It's a testament to her passion for the script, but even if it had been made 10 years prior, Immaculate would've still been decades out of date.

Immaculate is simply a film that doesn't need to exist. It gestures at an interesting idea—what if your devotion to God led you to a role that you weren’t sure you even wanted? What if you sought to serve in quiet devotion and instead received a starring role requiring the surrender of your body? But these are emotions barely gestured at in the script in order to set aside more time to hit all the cliches of nun-horror. Have you ever heard the phrase, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth?" Don't worry, you'll have it memorized by the time the credits roll. Have you ever found the black-and-white habits that nuns wear just a bit creepy? Turns out they're 10% creepier while wearing red cloth face masks for unclear reasons in the film.

The script pushes the immaculate conception and Cecilia's perspective on it to the side in a jaw-droppingly fast turnaround. The audience doesn’t know why Cecilia was chosen, how she feels about her life leading up to that moment, or if she has even a small inkling of pride that she's going to be the mother of the new messiah. It’s unclear if the filmmakers know, either. The film is afraid to engage with its own central idea, and Sweeney can't inject enough pathos into her role to carry the film beyond its muddling script.

Immaculate tips its hand so obviously and so early that it's just killing time until the inevitable ghoulish revelation of how the conception occurred. Instead of building tension or exploring Cecilia's emotional state, there's a series of incredibly obvious jump scares where the music fades out, the camera pulls back to show empty space behind Sweeney's face, and something bangs into her or a nearby window with a loud thud. Is a story still scary if the teller keeps interrupting themselves to let you know a scary moment is coming up?

Several events in the film also make no sense. Without spoiling the "twist," there's a long expository scene on the reasons and methods behind Cecilia's pregnancy that doesn't hold up to even the slightest scrutiny. The unique parts of the film are confusing, and the structure, idea, and even design elements all trade on older, better films.

Originality isn't a requirement for films. We've all loved at least one remake of a classic film or recommended a very similar favorite to a friend after they shared a particular genre classic. But style and a new perspective need to be prioritized in the absence of a fresh idea—and Immaculate has neither. The film's visuals are generic enough to be indistinguishable from the Conjuring Universe's The Nun, let alone the best of the nunsploitation genre like Alucarda or The Devils. Rather than living up to the precise, claustrophobic writing of Rosemary's Baby, Immaculate skims the surface of its characters' emotions and over-explains itself when subtlety is needed. And when the film finally does explode into a climax, it misses the madcap energy of Dario Argento and lands with a wet thud offscreen in the last two minutes.