Immaculate is a 2024 religious horror movie starring Sydney Sweeney as young Sister Cecilia. She joins an Italian convent when she discovers something incredibly sinister is happening beneath the surface. While Immaculate does succumb to telegraphed jump scares, it can craft a uniquely tense atmosphere that is creepy to watch.
Sydney Sweeney delivers the standout performance here. Off the screen, she auditioned for this movie a decade ago, and the project lost all traction. Yet she felt so deeply connected to the story that after all this time, she and her production company Fifty-Fifty Films got ahold of the story, written by Andrew Lobel, and were able to distribute the film with Neon’s help.
The way Sweeney talks about this movie is very inspiring. Thanks to more suits and capitalists in leadership roles at studios, movies have become more risk-averse, and a lot of promising movies have been passed over and shut down due to a lack of faith in the movies profiting. Movies like Immaculate deserve to be made, and I’m so happy it was.
On the screen, Sweeney is at her best. She, as Cecilia, enters this world being incredibly pure. All the characters point out how pretty and sweet she is, as they all know what the plan is for her. Throughout the movie we see her descend into madness as her surrounding situation deteriorates. As director Michael Mahon says, “Sister Cecilia’s journey —from an emblem of purity to a feral creature, drenched in blood— spoke to Sydney’s natural versatility”. Cecilia does not become a victim of the circumstances. She is proactive and goes on the offensive.
The movie is surprisingly super graphic as well. I’ll be honest, going into this movie I thought we’d get something like The Nun and Rosemary’s Baby, a supernatural thriller with a demon to explain her immaculate conception. But the horrors here are manmade, and the movie does not shy away from showing us the brutality of this covenant. My theater was relatively empty but certain scenes had us audibly saying “Oh my God!”
Outside of Sweeney and the gore, what Immaculate does very well is the atmosphere. The movie has a gothic theme to it, set in a covenant with many dark hallways and ghastly courtyards. The music the movie uses matches the tone incredibly well and matches the heightened emotion when it needs to.
Unfortunately, the movie does have a lot of telegraphed jump scares. The music slowly fades out and the camera is positioned to slowly reveal something or someone in the background. What makes it worse is that most of the jumpscares are shown in the trailer, and they don’t change much about them.
Even with that, the third act goes berserk. I mean it when I say the movie does not hold back on the blood, whether it’s someone getting their tongue cut out or their face bashed in. By this point, Cecilia has learned what the priests and nuns have done to her and we’ve fully descended into the madness. I won’t describe how the end plays out but this is an ending I promise will be seared into your mind for a while.
Final Thoughts
Immaculate is a good movie. I found it to be more creepy than scary, mostly because of how effective the atmosphere and imagery were and how ineffective the jumpscares were. Sydney Sweeney was passionate about this project and it truly showed in her performance here. If the first chunk of the movie feels a bit slow as we learn a bit about what’s happening behind the scenes, I promise you the final act will have you on the edge of your seat.
