An American nun embarks on a new journey when she joins a remote convent in the Italian countryside. However, her warm welcome quickly turns into a living nightmare when she discovers her new home harbours a sinister secret and unspeakable horrors.
Immaculate is directed by Michael Mohan director of One Too Many Mornings (2010), Save The Date (2012) and The Voyeurs (2021).
Immaculate is truly an interesting beast of a film, it takes a quite large subgenre in this case being horror films centered around religion and goes completely off the rails with it. The film itself starts out as a very traditional film within the subgenre but it quickly grows into it's own thing and you get bits and pieces of the direction throughout the film to ultimately lead into a chaotic finale.
Sydney Sweeney is absolutely phenomenal here, she's an actress who is quickly becoming one of the most exciting to watch. Much like her performance in Reality (2023) this is yet another already career best performance, her performance here starts out quiet but quickly goes off the rails. Particularly with the third act that is absolutely bonkers in the best way possible. Her performance as Cecilia completely matches the dark, mysterious and actually quite brutal atmosphere that the film was going for. The rest of the cast do an excellent job here as well, each of them play very out there characters who much like the rest of the movie quickly go from being quiet to absolute insanity. This is all done due to Michael Mohan's excellent direction that really shows he knows how to perfectly time when a film should completely surprise the viewer and go in a very different direction.
What surprised me the most is how actually quite brutal the film was, the gore here heavily reminded me of the "New French Wave of Extreme Horror" films such as Martyrs (2008), High Tension (2003), Inside (2007) and a few others. There were some genuinely shocking moments that were very effective, even how the film is shot sort of reminded me of those films, speaking of which the cinematography from Elisha Christian is fantastic. Almost immediately when the film begins you feel the atmosphere hit you, there's this sense of mystery of what is going to happen. It also helps that the film is confined into this small enough space that gives the brutal moments far more impact.
Finally there's the third act which as I've said earlier goes off the rails (in the best way possible) very quickly, it leads to one of Sydney Sweeney's best moments as an actress so far in her career. The film takes one hell of a dive into madness that really surprised me, it is absolutely best if you go into it knowing as little as possible!
Immaculate is available in theaters.
10/10 A+
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