Sydney Sweeney plays a nun – how about that for an elevator pitch? Immaculate is a film that Sweeney really wanted to play, having first auditioned to play the lead role aged 17. Now, ten years on, with money in the bank and acting as a producer on the movie, she finally gets the project aloft, a touch of a rewrite here, a fave director there and casting herself as a sweet novitiate nun who become the brood mare of… well it must be Satan, though no one ever utters the name.
A “devil’s dick” movie then, joining the likes of Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen, with the plot remarkably close to The First Omen, apparently. I have not seen it so cannot confirm. But I have seen Immaculate, a periodically Argento-esque exercise in gothic set in old Italy, where an ancient convent humming with purposeful life welcomes new arrival Sister Cecilia (Sweeney), a wide-eyed true believer from America shocked to discover there are nuns inside like Sister Gwen (the excellently moody Benedetta Porcaroli), who are there more because a convent guarantees three meals a day and safety and it beats working the streets.
Also disconcerting is the frosty attitude of Sister Isabelle (Giulia Heathfield Di Renzi), a top dog who clearly senses a threat, a severe Mother Superior (Dora Romano) and handsome priest Father Tedeschi, who because he’s handsome and twinkling away with as much wattage as Álvaro Morte can muster, looks like a like a character in search of a storyline. “Immaculate” suggests virginal and if someone is obviously going to blot that copybook it might as well be the reverend.
Though a lot of things do go pretty much as you’d expect in this movie, Father Tedeschi isn’t one of them. He’s more the handmaiden than the squire, if you follow my drift.
If you have seen The Voyeurs, which was really a dangle as to whether we were going to see Sydney Sweeney in the buff, you might be wondering whether she’s got its director, Michael Mohan, in to do something similar here. The answer is “sort of”. There is nothing quite as explicit as The Voyeurs but many a suggestive shot of Sweeney wringing wet in a clingy white shift, imagery that owes quite a bit to Playboy at its most soft focus and yellow-filtered.
The looks overall are soft-porn too, mixed with the dark attractive and grainy, grimy looks of old oil paintings glimpsed in underlit Italian churches. It’s all very evocative, and Sweeney’s big eyes and voluptuous figure are well used as counterpoints to each other – is she virgin or whore?
Yes, Argento, here and there, particularly in that set-up – American girl arriving at a closed institution in Europe (Suspiria) – but Mohan and DP Elisha Christian also give us explicit flashes of Argento red here and there. And the final section involving much screaming and running around, as the heavily pregnant Cecilia realises exactly what’s going down, are also highly reminiscent of Argento – cut fast, atmospheric, not always entirely logical.
Sweeney is excellent (when is she not?) and has clearly decided that if she’s going to be a scream queen she’s going to be the screamiest of them all. The birth sequence – camera locked on Sweeney’s face while Cecilia expels the godless blob – is both shrieky and a great route map for any dentists wishing to take a tour of Sweeney’s teeth.
If you like gore, you’ll probably like Immaculate, though it tastefully withdraws for its final post-birth moment of gruesomeness that’s probably best not seen (for reasons of staying sympathetic with the character if nothing else). And if you like movies about diabolical insemination and don’t care how often you’ve seen the same scenes played out in other films, climb aboard. That’s the only real complaint, really. Immaculate behaves as if we hadn’t seen it all before. But this birth is far from virgin.
Immaculate – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
