Of late, Catholic priests have gotten off easy in horror films. The likes of The Exorcism Of Emily Rose and The Pope’s Exorcist present the Vatican as sponsoring demon-busting good guys, even as the real-world institution is mired in the scandals covered by Spotlight.
Immaculate changes the formula, putting a virtual novice against a sinister hierarchy out to exploit her for the good of the faith. Mirroring Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen, Immaculate counters those films’ diabolic conspiracies to summon the Antichrist with a purportedly better-intentioned plot to bring about the Second Coming.
The representative face of horror in 2024 is Sweeney’s blood-smeared to-camera stare.
Sydney Sweeney, who worked with director Michael Mohan on The Voyeurs, puts a lot into Immaculate, and almost single-handedly lifts it out of the hokey religious-fright-film category. Her Sister Cecilia, devout and literally virginal, takes her vows seriously and tries to be obedient to superiors’ orders — no matter how dictatorial, oppressive, cruel or callous. Until a point when the meekness cracks, and she tries to escape, which brings down more extreme punishment. The Italian convent where she resides is a splendidly Gothic locale, replete with a sinister sub-order of red-masked torturer nuns (cuing eerie reuse of a track from Bruno Nicolai’s score for the 1972 Italian horror film The Red Queen Kills Seven Times) and sternly fanatical priests, a Frankensteinian birthing suite decorated with bottled mutants, and some mentioned-early, off-limits catacombs sure to figure in the third act.
The high concept of Immaculate isn’t entirely fresh — some key plot elements were used in Stuart Urban’s 2001 film Revelation — but Mohan’s presentation is bluntly, brutally effective. The film works better as a critique of the church’s attitude to women in its earlier, subtler stretches — as Cecilia is at once venerated as a possible saint and treated as disposable wrapping paper for the gift the church elders really want. But the impact comes in the gruelling home stretch, as the heavily pregnant, abused and spiritually crisis-ridden Cecilia takes extreme — and extremely controversial — measures to escape from God’s plan. The representative face of horror in 2024 is Sweeney’s blood-smeared to-camera stare accompanied by a truly soul-scraping scream.