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 cliché 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.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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