Immaculate review – get thee to a different nunnery

As someone who spent 14 years attending Catholic school, I sometimes think nuns get a bit of a bad rap. The Irish sisters that popped up every so often to teach us hymns were uniformly lovely and benevolent. Nothing like the malevolent convent in Rivette’s The Nun, or the repressed Congregation of The Servants of Mary in Black Narcissus. But I do understand the appeal of corrupted Christ Brides which fuelled the entire nunsploitation genre – it’s a bit more titillating than The Sound of Music, and it’s not as if the Catholic church is running low on skeletons in their cloisters to draw from. The latest horror to take aim at the purity culture embedded in organised religion, Immaculate is the second collaboration between director Michael Mohan and actor Sydney Sweeney following The Voyeurs, an erotic thriller about a couple who begin spying on their neighbours, though this time from a script written by Andrew Lobel (his first feature).

To their credit, Mohan and Sweeney make for an engaging partnership (Sweeney also produced the film, and bought the rights to the screenplay after first auditioning for it in 2014) but the script itself is fairly weak, with generic dialogue and a derivative plot that borrows heavily from Rosemary’s Baby. Sweeney is a charming presence as Sister Cecelia, a good-natured American who accepts an invitation to join an Italian convent after her own parish closes down due to falling attendance figures, though the character very much feels like a conventional final girl rather than anything fresh. Having survived an accident as a child where she fell through the ice on a frozen lake, Cecelia believes God has a plan for her, and when she mysteriously falls pregnant despite being a virgin, Father Sal Tedeschi (Álvaro Morte) and Cardinal Franco Merola (Giorgio Colangeli) are quick to deem her condition the second coming of Christ. Cecelia and her only ally at the convent, the rebellious Gwen (Benedetta Porcaroli) are sceptical, particularly when the extent of resident mean nun Sister Isabelle’s (Giulia Heathfield Di Renzi) jealousy is revealed.

Despite a short 90-minute runtime Immaculate gets off to a slow start, and when the central conflict is revealed, it sorely lacks originality which even Sweeney’s extremely committed shrieking can’t distract from. While there’s only so much new life to be breathed into centuries-old religious iconography, Immaculate feels underwhelming all the same, particularly coming only a few short years after Paul Verhoeven’s bawdy Benedetta, which covers similar territory in a more daring manner. Despite the best efforts of DoP Elisha Christian to create a striking visual identity, the film ultimately brings little to well-trodden cinematic ground, even in its hell-for-leather finale. It’s a shame, because Immaculate sets up some interesting threads – the obsession with purity in the Catholic church, the idea of a convent that specifically caters to elderly and unwell nuns – but these give way to a more cliche idea that isn’t developed or pushed to extremes enough to be novel.

It’s a shame that Immaculate is so underwhelming because Sweeney is a likeable presence and truly brings meaning to the term ‘Scream Queen’, but this many decades into religious-based horror, we can do so much better than this.

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