IMMACULATE (2024)

Studio:   Neon
Director: Michael Mohan
Writer:   Andrew Lobel
Producer: David Bernad, Sydney Sweeney, Jonathan Davino, Teddy Schwarzman, Michael Heimler
Stars:    Sydney Sweeney, Alvaro Morte, Dora Romano, Benedetta Porcaroli, Giorgio Colangeli, Simona Tabasco, Giulia Heathfield Di Renzi, Giampiero Judica

Review Score:

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Summary:

A novice American nun travels to an Italian convent where an unexpected pregnancy begins to expose shocking secrets.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Young nun Sister Mary attempts a nighttime escape from Our Lady of Sorrows, a convalescent convent in Italy where elderly nuns receive hospice care, but she is captured by a group of gloved nuns wearing red veils over their faces. The nuns bury Sister Mary alive in a coffin.

After she is briefly detained by customs agents, Deacon Enzo picks up novice American nun Sister Cecilia Jones, who has traveled to Italy to take her vows at Our Lady of Sorrows, from the airport. Upon arriving at the convent, Mother Superior introduces Cecilia to Sister Isabelle, a young nun who treats Cecilia coldly. Later tasked with mentoring Cecilia in the convent's operations, Isabelle advises Cecilia to play along with any of the elderly nuns suffering from delusions. Isabelle also cryptically warns Cecilia that there is still time to return home to Michigan without taking her vows.

Cecilia meets fellow novice Sister Gwen, a former sex worker with a rebellious attitude. Cecilia mentions that Father Sal Tedeschi personally recruited her to join Our Lady of Sorrows.

Cecilia formally meets Father Tedeschi at the ceremony where she and the other novices take their vows. The ceremony ends with Cecilia kissing the ring on Cardinal Franco Merola's finger. While drinking wine with Tedeschi at a reception afterward, Cecilia tells him about how she died for seven minutes after falling in a frozen lake several years earlier, and she came away believing God had a purpose for her.

That night, Cecilia finds a red-veiled nun praying face down in front of an altar beneath the chapel. Seeing Cecilia there, Mother Superior shows her that the altar houses the supposedly holy relic of a nail that crucified Jesus to his cross, and was brought back from Jerusalem by Saint Helena. Cecilia collapses. While asleep, Cecilia dreams of red-veiled nuns attacking her.

Cecilia wakes to find elderly Sister Francesca cutting off a lock of her hair. After escorting Francesca back to her bad, Cecilia observes crosses branded onto the soles of her feet.

Cecilia takes a urine test after experiencing morning sickness. Summoned to a meeting with Father Tedeschi, Cardinal Merola, Mother Superior, and the convent's physician Doctor Gallo, a shocked Cecilia discovers she is inexplicably pregnant even though she never had sexual intercourse. Merola declares it a miracle and the convent celebrates her as the next Virgin Mary.

Five months into her pregnancy, Cecilia vomits out one of her teeth. Doctor Gallo and Father Tedeschi refuse Cecilia's subsequent request to see another doctor or go to a hospital.

Sister Isabelle unsuccessfully tries drowning Cecilia in a bath. As other nuns pull Isabelle away, she cryptically screams, "It was supposed to be me" and "They have to try again with me!" Isabelle is later found dead when she falls from a great height with her face torn off.

Sister Gwen warns Cecilia that no one in the convent can be trusted. Father Tedeschi and Deacon Enzo pull Gwen away when she begins calling out Mother Superior and others for being complicit in an unknown conspiracy.

Behind a painting in her room, Cecilia finds a Bible reference that speaks of Satan masquerading as a child of light. Snooping around an office, Cecilia also finds her private file, which contains a newspaper clipping about her deathly drowning incident. Finally, Cecilia spies through a keyhole to see red-veiled nuns cutting out Gwen's tongue.

Sister Francesca interrupts to give Cecilia a cross fashioned from Cecilia's hair. Cecilia asks for help, but Sister Francesca warns that Cecilia will never leave the convent.

Cecilia rouses convent officials when she wakes up screaming and seemingly bleeding between her legs. Fearing a miscarriage, Father Tedeschi and Deacon Enzo reluctantly rush Cecilia to a hospital. However, Mother Superior finds a slaughtered chicken under Cecilia's bed that reveals she faked her dire circumstances. Mother Superior calls Tedeschi, who immediately stops the car before it gets to the hospital. Cecilia tries to flee on foot, but Tedeschi and Enzo capture her.

Back at the convent, Cecilia is restrained to a wheelchair. Tedeschi explains to her that they found blood and flesh on the nail relic, which they believed to be Jesus's DNA. Tedeschi wheels Cecilia into a secret laboratory where he further reveals that he was a scientist before becoming a priest. He has since spent 20 years of trial-and-error genetic experiments trying to find the perfect fertile vessel to impregnate with a resurrected Christ before finally finding Cecilia. Tedeschi ultimately brands Cecilia's feet with crosses and locks her in her room.

Near the end of her third trimester, Cecilia beats Mother Superior to death with a heavy cross to escape her room. Cecilia's water breaks. Cecilia then strangles Cardinal Merola with the rosary around his neck. Doctor Gallo flees in fear.

Cecilia recovers the nail relic before entering Tedeschi's lab, which she douses in flammable chemicals. Tedeschi tries to recapture her, but Cecilia locks him inside the lab before setting it on fire.

Cecilia flees to the catacombs of Saint Stephen below the convent. There, she finds Gwen's dead body. Having escaped the lab, a badly burned Tedeschi catches up to Cecilia. The priest tries using a scalpel to cut into her stomach, but Cecilia kills Tedeschi by thrusting the nail relic into his neck.

Cecilia crawls outside where she painfully gives birth to a child that is not seen, but is heard vaguely growling. After severing the umbilical cord with her teeth, Cecilia recovers a large rock. Cecilia lifts up the rock and swings it down toward the unseen baby as the camera cuts to black.

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Review:

A fun fact about me I'm not sure I've shared before: My mom was a nun. Obviously, this was before she became married with children, but she was a nun at one point in her life nonetheless. And let me tell you, there ain't nothing like being a kid and happening upon a photo featuring your young mother wearing a habit with her hands clasped to burn a WTF image your mind's eye can never unsee.

Just as obviously, my mom's first career choice goes a long way toward explaining how I ended up being raised Catholic. She might have stopped being a nun, but that didn't stop her from passing on her belief in Jesus to her kids. We weren't devout Christians who said prayers over meals or read the Bible together or anything like that. But I did go to church every weekend, attended Catholic school up through grade 12, and even spent several years as an altar boy, too.

Like a lot of Catholics who added "lapsed" in front of that word, my interests gradually pulled me in directions where outdated dogma served no practical purpose in my modern adult world. It seemed to me I could live a benevolent life without being blindly devoted to imaginary entities, historical fiction, or any organized religion whose history is problematic, to put it mildly. Personal experiences ultimately took me to a position where instead of being fearful of things like demonic possession, antichrist apocalypses, and eternal damnation, I saw those subjects as flights of fancy. That's why I cackle when horror movies illustrate the dark humor in such concepts, all while performative outrage specialists shout about supposed sacrilege.

To be clear, I don't advocate for reckless disrespect just because I no longer hold spiritual beliefs. I'm saying I can find the wicked fun in films like "Immaculate" because I once held those beliefs. Put another way, I don't take perverse pleasure in condescending irreverence toward Catholicism. I just see religious extremes as senseless rather than sacred, so I'm amused when clever subversiveness reminds audiences to not take anything so seriously that it can't be spoofed or skewered by something as innocuous as a Friday night fright film.

While I'm itemizing grains of salt you can take with my review, I might as well mention I'm friends with "Immaculate" screenwriter Andrew Lobel, as we regularly play together on the same horror trivia team. It's possible our connection bumped up my review score a bit, though I wouldn't be so sure. I am sure that if I didn't enjoy "Immaculate" or if I had something snarky to say about the script, I simply wouldn't have written anything at all. At any rate, let all of the information above calibrate my potential biases however you see fit.

"Immaculate" contains a lot of the usual suspects for "nunsploitation" horror. Mother Superior goes without saying, although the hierarchy at Our Lady of Sorrows actually puts her rung lower on the authority ladder than one might expect. Men like Father Tedeschi and Cardinal Merola really run the show at this Italian convent, which is where Sydney Sweeney's novice American nun Sister Cecilia travels to take her vows.

Shortly after her arrival, Cecilia meets Sister Isabelle. She's the requisite stern nun. Her hair pulled back so tight her eyebrows sit in the center of her forehead, Isabelle's perfect posture keeps her straight as stick, with tightened elbows tucking her arms at her sides.

Sister Gwen complements Sister Isabelle. Gwen is the requisite fun nun. Cecilia meets her while sitting on a toilet. A reformed prostitute who cares nothing for formalities, Gwen simply barges into the bathroom, plops down on the windowsill, and smokes a cigarette while nonchalantly introducing herself.

What's different about "Immaculate's" initially familiar cast of characters and setting is Our Lady of Sorrows isn't an ordinary convent. It's also a convalescent home where elderly nuns receive hospice care in their final days. This makes it so that when weird nuns start doing weird things, which they inevitably do in these films, you can't quite be sure what's possibly demonic and what's possibly dementia. So now we're set up for a few swerves, and "Immaculate" makes the most out of the little twists it pinches to tweak the "nun horror" formula.

"Immaculate" clicks along at a comfortable pace as it rolls out expected beats. It shouldn't be too much of a spoiler to reveal someone ends up inexplicably pregnant. I'll pretend it's a mystery, but I'm sure you know who. Once again though, there's a little wrinkle included to suggest this isn't your usual "secret cult birthing the devil" scenario. Something else comes into play to make you question possibilities you wouldn't usually consider if this pregnancy is seen all the way through.

By the time Sydney Sweeney delivers an expertly timed expletive following a brutal bludgeoning death, "Immaculate" makes it abundantly clear that it's going to keep going gonzo throughout its relentless last reel. Similar to how holiday horror films fashion creative kills out of Christmas lights, candy canes, and glittery decorations, "Immaculate" takes each piece of religious iconography anyone can think of and devises a devious way to make a murder out of it. Add in another element that's the equivalent of an Atomic Era mad scientist with a secret laboratory and you can't help but applaud "Immaculate" for being fearlessly brash, purely for the benefit of midnight movie mayhem.

Those who take offense at the context, which involves a lot of Catholic carnage that'll be difficult for some to stomach, or at the subtext, which is unsubtle commentary about women forced into unwanted pregnancies in a post-Roe political climate, need not apply. But those who wait it out to get to a good old-fashioned gorefest washed with occult undertones should agree "Immaculate's" fat-free 80 minutes hits the Goldilocks sweet spot for a satisfying serving of twisted entertainment.

Review Score: 75

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