The Sydney Sweeney train keeps chugging along, as the physically blessed actress/influencer takes command of the box office one movie genre at a time. Anyone But You, the silly Much Ado About Nothing redo she did with that pretty boy from Top Gun: Maverick, shocked the hell out of everyone by making more than $200 million worldwide. What wasn’t shocking was how much Madame Web, the sisterly superhero movie she co-starred in with Dakota Johnson, was reviled by critics and audiences. (It wasn’t her fault; it was another installment of Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, in which a studio stubbornly continues to keep a comic-book franchise going by just doing half-assed origin stories about the antiheroes.)
This month’s Sydney Sweeney movie has her stepping away from the audience-friendly confines of rom-coms and action blockbusters and diving deep into some gory, ghoulish, R-rated shit with Immaculate. Sweeney gets chaste as hell as Sister Cecilia, an aspiring American nun who arrives in a convent in the Italian countryside. Even before she gets the hang of things, our virginal heroine soon discovers she will be the mother of an immaculately conceived child.
Clocking in at 89 minutes — for which I am downright appreciative — Immaculate gets the down-and-dirty danger going at a pleasantly swift pace. Sweeney (who also serves as a producer) and director Michael Mohan (who also directed her in the Amazon Prime erotic thriller The Voyeurs) continue their union as a director-star team out to make 21st-century exploitation thrillers. Using a script from first-time screenwriter Andrew Lobel, they create a nasty, nutty addition to the nunsploitation genre.
You don’t have to be a diehard fan of Italian horror to know that everyone involved in this is clearly getting their giallo on. (Even composer Will Bates goes all Ennio Morricone in the score, throwing in full-bodied but foreboding harpsichords and church organs.) Sweeney’s sister-in-trouble is surrounded by supporting characters you’d regularly find in a sordid scarefest set in Dario Argento country. There’s the studly but shady father (Alvaro Morte); Cecilia’s fellow sister and confidant (Benedetta Porcaroli), who immediately starts getting suspicious; the staunch sister (Simona Tabasco) who keeps looking at Cecilia sideways. We also got a crew of masked nuns with holes in their hands, slinking around and making sure secrets stay hidden by taking out those who wanna break out and talk.
Immaculate unfortunately doesn’t indulge in any kinky, erotic freakiness (although we do get titillating shots of Sweeney and Tabasco wearing sheer nightgowns and bathing in a huge-ass tub). The movie makes up for it with wall-to-wall macabre madness. It seems like the sort of batshit psycho-thriller Lucio Fulci used to drop all the time in the ‘70s. I’m surprised there isn’t a scene — a Fulci staple — where a dummy that’s supposed to be one of the characters falls off a cliff, getting facially fucked up by jagged rocks all the way down.
It’s kinda fascinating, even admirable, seeing Sweeney and company make a horror flick that proudly embraces its lurid lunacy. Even when the story goes down predictable avenues, Mohan still keeps everything creepy and suspenseful. And I must say Sweeney has the whole babe-in-the-woods thing down pat. Her protagonist comes into this clueless, goes through several stages of hell and eventually chooses violence in the chaotic climax — and that’s even before she gives birth to the supposed second coming of Jesus. (Yeah, that scene is bonkers!)
Considering how Sweeney literally ends up bloody and screaming, I’m actually impressed that this young lady — a consistent object of online desire ever since her role as the usually nude Cassie on Euphoria — is ready and willing to freak out audiences with Immaculate, and look like a gotdamn mess in the process. This kid may be a movie star after all.
Immaculate
Directed by Michael Mohan. Written by Andrew Lobel. Opens March 22.
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