Immaculate — Movie Review
Immaculate stars Sydney Sweeney as Cecilia, a nun of devout Catholic faith who is invited to live at an Italian convent. While there, she almost immediately discovers that the convent is housing some disturbing secrets and strange behavior from her fellow Nuns, leading her down a rabbit hole that puts her right in the middle of the convent’s strange happenings.
For a movie that I didn’t even know existed until roughly a week ago, I didn’t really walk into it with many expecations. All I can say is that as I watched things unfold, the standout for my money was Sydney Sweeney, the biggest name of the whole project. She’s solid as a devout Catholic nun who genuinely wants to do right by her faith and believe that everything done in God’s name is for the greater good, almost to the point of naivety. She’s good as a caring nun who’s put in the middle of dark circumstances, but she also really commits to being a scream queen who has some standout moments where she really has to let loose and let the acting chops flow through her. She’s very good in those parts, particularly one moment near the very end of the film. All in all, she shows that of the many problems with Madame Web, her acting wasn’t one of them.
As for the plot, it’s a simple and straightforward “Something doesn’t feel right” story as Cecilia navigates her way about this convent and discovers certain things. There’s an omnipresent feeling of dread from the getgo and there’s even some decent moments of suspense that take their time to build as you go along on this journey with Cecilia. It’s a slow burn as you see her experience disturbing things that get gradually worse and worse. Granted, there’s some very predictable and lazy jump scares scattered throughout and those greatly annoyed me, to the point of saying that they harmed what could’ve been a really solid horror film with some subtle clues as to what’s really going on behind the scenes. They weren’t enough to completely derail the whole film, thought. We reach that point near the end of the second act and start of the third act.
I’m going to avoid talking about this movie in spoiler detail, but I’ll say that this movie has a reveal near the end, a reveal that involves a certain antagonistic character explaining his motivations for doing what he’s doing. It was in this reveal that the movie went full cheesy B-movie and I wasn’t into it at all. It’s goofy and it even feels like a tonal departure from the rest of the film, it feeling more science-fiction compared to the straightforward horror that we were getting beforehand. I won’t go so far as to say that it completely ruined everything, but I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t starting to check out at this point in the movie.
But then we reach a point in the third act where things get completely wild and crazy and this ended up being my favorite part of the whole film. The movie is just going for it, as it were. There ends up being more gore and intense imagery than I expected and the very final scene is just bonkers, but in a good way where the movie seems to know what it’s serving up and you’re expected to just roll with it. I myself was enjoying myself in the most morbid was possible with this movie’s ending and I found myself wishing that the rest of the movie was just like this.
Overall, Immaculate is just fine. It starts out as a slow burn that’s interesting and eerie enough, despite some cheap scares here and there. Sweeney is carrying a lot of this movie on her shoulders and she helps it to just barely squeak across the finish line after an extremely cartoony twist that didn’t sit right with me at all. That said, I didn’t leave this theater angry that I had seen it. It was a perfectly watchable experience and if you’re a horror buff who’s looking to scratch that itch this weekend, you could do much worse.
