Immaculate (2024)

Warning: I will spoil some elements of the film’s ridiculousness, including its ending, because I’m not going to hide its main selling points.

American novitiate nun Sister Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney) is transferred to a pretty swanky looking convent for her final vows. The place is actually a hospice for elderly, dying nuns, many of whom suffer from the mental vagaries of old age as well, but clearly, the Church has decided to see them off in style. However, some of the nuns – elderly and not – act rather weirdly, treating Cecilia either as if she were about to be sainted, or like their mortal enemy. Things become curiouser still when Cecilia becomes pregnant – without ever having had sex in her life.

Her superiors decide rather quickly – and certainly without consulting the Vatican – this to be a case of immaculate conception, and thus, Cecilia is the new Mother of God. But there’s something nasty hiding behind dressing our heroine up like Maria and singing her praises.

I have repeatedly gone on record with my general lack of interest in religious horror, but I do tend to make an exception for its absurd and trashy arm, even more so when the absurdity and trashiness is combined either with the values of classic Italian exploitation or an comparatively high budget to pump into its idiocy. Michael Mohan’s Immaculate manages to have a foot in both camps, thus making me very happy indeed.

Having said that, I also have to warn anyone looking for a serious piece of (religious) horror: this is as absurd and trashy as it can get away with, throwing away concepts like believability and logic with great enthusiasm. Andrew Lobel’s script suggests it knows Catholic doctrine only from the pages of 18th Century anti-Catholic literature (as if the actual church didn’t have flaws enough), and has never met a human being or an actual religious believer – fanatic or not. It’s pretty impressive, in its own way, mostly because it enables the film to come up with its central conceit: a Church conspiracy to mad science up an embryo clone of Jesus Christ (gene material apparently donated by a nail from the True Cross) and implant it in a particularly “fertile” young nun, obviously – this is the Church, after all – without consent. Or, if needed, a series of nuns.

As it happens, this conspiracy also is into torture and murder, and has nuns who hide their faces behind stocking masks directly out of giallo central. In practice, this is exactly as awesome (and tasteless) as it sounds. The film’s plot, such as it is, contains little actual drama, but does provide a series of set pieces for Sweeney to enthusiastically overemote in, mechanical jump scares in exhausting number, surprising amounts of squishy gore in the Italian tradition and a general sense of unhinged enthusiasm for material that’s crude and more than just a bit dumb. Of course, its’s exactly that crudity and stupidity that makes the whole affair as enjoyable as it is, even more so since the film mostly plays things straight, as if this were high religious (anti-religious?) drama.

To make things even better, Mohan packages the glorious nonsense in often strikingly composed shots – with more than a nod to Italian exploitation cinema of old –, and stylish, moody camera work while strolling through some wonderfully designed sets.

It’s a truly wonderful piece of exploitation cinema that had me riveted to the screen throughout. I suspect not exactly in the way the film was meant to be taken, but it’s not as if I were doing something as disrespectful as enjoying myself ironically.

Apart from the obvious candidates from the 70s and 80s, this would make fantastic double feature with the likeminded yet also antithetical The Pope’s Exorcist – one can only dream of a team-up between said exorcist and Sister Cecilia, killer of the Sweet Baby Jesus, in a future Pope’s Exorcistiverse movie.