Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney) joins a covenant, an idyllic estate in Italy that serves as the final mission for the ill and elderly sisters of the faith.  After taking her vows, she begins to suffer from strange dreams involving figures dressed in red and one of the nails of the cross which is held in the convent.  Soon after the dreams, she then begins to feel ill and when taken to the infirmary it is revealed that she’s pregnant; a virgin birth. While many at the convent are inclined to help Cecilia, notably Father Tedeschi (Alvaro Morte), others do not take kindly to the special treatment Cecilia is being given, and soon the novitiate finds herself with more enemies than friends in this house of prayer. 

After a long gestation process and Andrew Lobel’s script being transplanted from a high-school to a convent, director Michael Mohan brings Immaculate to screens, courtesy of Neon.  The anticipated film premiered at South by Southwest Film Festival where it competed as one of the headliners.  General audiences did not need to wait long for the 89-minute psychological thriller to hit their local screens.  With lush cinematography from Elisha Christian and a worshipful score from Will Bates, Immaculate is akin to the beautiful stained glass windows or stately effigies found in the most elegant of churches, but the dancing shadows from the candles within bring about an eerie sense of danger. 

Immaculate is following in the long line of nunsploitation films while also following a traditional horror template so it may feel that the intent behind the film was to shock and offend.  While it certainly is a brutal story that devolves into a pulpy and bloody affair, there is a lot of thought and care put into both the lore and the craft of the film that it plays out more like an exceptionally grim fable to an open-minded audience that will meet the film on its level.  Its reliance on the horror tropes ends up being its biggest weakness as the film is not as searing of a drama as Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s seminal Black Narcissus (1947) or Maggie Betts’ Novitiate (2017), but setting this film in modern times, the choices made do feel like more of a direct attack on the church and its sensibilities than the 17th-centrury set – and far more promiscuous – Benedetta (2021) from Paul Verhoeven.  As it weaves its way through a final girl arc, the film feels more closely related to Luca Guadagnino‘s updated Suspira (2018) than any film that seeks to peek behind the veil of the devout. 

It feels like such a pointed takedown because as the film unfolds it presents itself as a brutally bold and bloody abortion piece.  Given the rise of Christian nationalists who, in the wake of dismantling Roe v Wade and are now seeking to limit abortion access across the nation overwhelmingly against the will of the voters, Lobel is purposfully appropriating the styles and lore of some of the most holy and it feels exceptionally viscous.  As it is revealed in the film, Father Tadechi is a geneticist who has been using dried blood from the nail to try and bring about the second coming of Christ.  It is a strange intersection between science and the church, especially since IVF is one of the latest fertility treatments to come under fire, but the story suffers here most given its brief runtime.  We understand Tedeschi to be the villain of the narrative and the film is regretably content to leave it at that without delving in much deeper or developing him more.  Even without a monster in the more traditional sense, a horror film typically lives and dies on the lore of its antagonist and Imacculate just does not give Morte enough of a foundation on the page to build the chilling villain the script otherwise treats him as. To Morte’s credit, he chews the scenery with the best of them and gives the perfromance everything he can.

When the film is more focused on operating as a horror, it is at its best, though unfortunately it is more gore than lore despite the ripe setting.  That being said, it is not a totally gruesome and exploitative exercise so many fans of directors who are pushing the limits on audience comfort may not find much to latch on here.  In this way, the film almost lets down both facets of its audience which it is trying to court, but the ultimate selling point of Immaculate truly lies in its star power and Sweeney excels in the role even if it does not ask that much of her. She is commanding on the screen despite the fact that her arc is largely passive as in it is a series of events that happen to her rather than something she herself sets into motion.

The finale, though, is a moment of retribution not only as she faces off against Father Tadechi in a gnarly scrimmage, but the final sequence when Cecilia is free from the catacombs is extremely upsetting in the way that well-constructed and thought-out horror should be. Christian’s camera holds on a medium shot for much of the sequence as Cecilia makes her way to a stone wall, removing a block, and returning to where her new born baby lies crying. Republicans, rejoice, there is finally evidence of a “post-birth abortion” that you yourselves did not need to conjure up in your own imagination to get mad about. Now, notably, we never see to what degree of success Father Tadechi’s latest experiment achieved, and we do not have to, as man or beast does not matter. The emotion of the scene is what drives the ending and while shielding audiences from seeing the infant in whatever form it was born is the more marketable route for sure, there is also more power in the ambiguity of it all because no matter what state the child was born in, it is the conclusion of Cecilia’s arc which carries the horror and unlocks the catharsis of the scene. 

Immaculate is a film with a lot on its mind, and in a race to get it all out, much of the narrative detail is unfortunately glossed over. It is gorgeous to look at, though, and from the production designed led by Adam Reamer, the horrors unfold in a fully realized world. It is just missing that hook to keep us engaged through the otherwise standard pregnancy scheme having tipped its hand too early with the red-washed dream sequence. The twists and turns the story takes – up until the final moments, at least – are well trodden paths that even those without a deep knowledge of the genre can be more or less certain what nefarious works are at play here. The fault here is that Lobel’s script is stuck in the middle of being too long for a short film but not long enough to support his characters. Leanness and efficiency are always appreciated, especially in horror which can often find itself overwrought and stale by the end of the film, but Immaculate plays out more like a soft bump in the night rather than a hand from the darkness that reaches out and refuses to let go.