Immaculate: Yawn…. Another Nun-Beset-by-Evil Story with Excess Gore, Absent Pizzazz

By Chris Knight

Rating: C-

I have a confession to make. Watching Immaculate, starring (and co-produced by) the radiant, she’s-everywhere Sydney Sweeney, I felt — bored.

It’s not among the seven deadly sins, or even one of the lesser ones, and there’s no commandment against it, so I should be catechismally safe in my reaction. But I wish this latest nun-beset-by-evil story (see The Nun, The Nun II, Annabelle: Creation, Agnes, Prey for the Devil — and that’s just in the last few years) had more going on that just a mishmash of horror tropes, religious symbolism, and over-the-top gore.

But it is what it is. Sweeney stars as Sister Cecilia, a nun from suburban Detroit whose childhood experience of falling through river ice and almost dying provides the first of many totally unnecessary jump scares. She’s been invited to join a convent in Italy that provides hospice care for nuns.

Soon after her arrival at Our Lady of Sorrows (est. 1632) she notices weird things happening. A bird crashes into a window. (Jump scare!) A creepy old nun steals a lock of her hair. (Jump scare!) And a confession turns into a nightmare from which she wakes, panting and terrified. (Jump scare meets overused cliché!)

Oh, but there’s much more going on than ultra-creaky doors and somehow silent floors; the better to sneak up on and jump-scare others. Cecilia, despite having never strayed from her vows of obedience, poverty, and chastity, is found to be pregnant. And while everyone in the convent is quick to declare a miracle, it’s also possible that some kind of weird plan is afoot. Call it The Boys from Bethlehem.

Director Michael Mohan, who also directed Sweeney in 2021’s The Voyeurs, creates a wildly uneven tone here, with a film that starts out promising to be a supernatural horror before segueing into something far more prosaic.

And while the final act is an entertainingly bonkers affair — think Darren Aronofsly’s mother! from 2017 — it’s so out of keeping with the rest of the movie that it serves to take us out of the action.

And so I say unto it words from Revelation 3: “I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.”

Immaculate, you’ve been Sunday schooled.

Immaculate. Directed by Michael Mohan. Starring Sydney Sweeney, and Alvero Morte. In theatres March 22.