Immaculate

Sydney Sweeney stars as a novice recruited to be a nun at at a remote convent in the Italian countryside where older nuns are taken care of in their final days. From the pre-credit sequence, involving a nun frantically attempting to flee the order only to be tracked down and buried alive, it's obvious to the audience there's something dark happening in the convent long before Sister Cecilia (Sweeney) arrives. Not long after arriving, Cecilia discovers she is pregnant, leading the nuns treat her as a new Virgin Mary... well, except for the one (Giulia Heathfield Di Renzi) who attempts to drown Cecilia out of jealousy.

Despite the imagery we see throughout the movie of masked nuns doing odd and horrific things, the twist to the film isn't about any satanic cult but instead Father Sal Tedeschi's (Álvaro Morte) attempts to birth a new savior using DNA from one of the nails that crucified Jesus and Cecilia as an immaculate intubator for his science experiment.

The two things the film has going for it are the setting and aesthetic, which lends itself well to the strange candlelit scenes in dark corners of the convent, and Sweeney in a habit (playing into any hierophilia fetish of the audience). However, despite being weird and at times bordering on creepy, at no time did Immaculate feel scary. In fact, several of the scenes come off campier than expected. I don't think it ever lives up to the promise we get in the first scene. And while the film does a fair job of explaining Father Tedeschi's obsession, it never really explains the willingness of the nuns to throw all-in with him on relying on blasphemous science rather than faith, including torturing and murdering members of their own order.

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• Title: Immaculate
• IMDb: link