\u201cImmaculate\u201d feels like both a throwback to another era of Italian horror and a timely commentary on woman\u2019s bodily autonomy, but it can\u2019t match the flair of the former and lacks the thematic thrust to convey anything resonant about the latter. Star Sydney Sweeney continues her \u201cmoment\u201d after the success of \u201cAnyone but You\u201d and a gig hosting \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d with a horror film that comes branded with the reputation of Neon, one of the most respected distributors in the industry. She does absolutely nothing wrong here, finding a potential new arrow in her professional quiver as a scream queen, but everything else around \u201cImmaculate\u201d crumbles due to its remarkable lack of ambition. \u201cImmaculate\u201d feels like a passion project for Sweeney, who produced the film too, but no one else. The rest of it has the sheen of VOD, leaving the poor star stranded in a project that doesn\u2019t remotely operate on the same level. I kept wanting Russell Crowe to ride in on his \u201cPope\u2019s Exorcist\u201d Vespa and whisk her off to a better movie.<\/p>\n
Sweeney plays Cecilia, a young woman who we know absolutely nothing about beyond her resolute devotion, courtesy of a childhood accident on a frozen lake that should have killed her. Like almost every character in \u201cImmaculate,\u201d Cecilia is a mystery, a pawn being moved on a genre board. That\u2019s not always a problem if a film has the style to overcome a lack of character development, but Michael Mohan\u2019s film almost defiantly lacks in visual language, drab when it needs to be vibrant and flat when it needs to pop. Many will compare this film to the Giallo genre because it\u2019s Italian horror set in a convent, but Giallo is about big, vibrant cinematic expression in ways that \u201cImmaculate\u201d never considers, much less pulls off. <\/p>\n
Cecelia arrives at an Italian convent in a relatively vague time period\u2014when this film exactly takes place was never really clear to me in a way that was almost distracting\u2014that\u2019s deep in the remote countryside. We know that this house of the Lord is dangerous because we\u2019ve seen one of those classic horror movie prologues in which a young woman is murdered by mysterious figures. In this one, it\u2019s sisters in red masks, who pull a young nun from her escape attempt and bury her alive. Is Cecelia now taking her place? And will she meet the same fate? <\/p>\n
Before any time passes at all really, Cecelia is struck by visions in the convent, and unsettled by some of the characters around what is basically both a training center for young nuns and a hospice for older ones. The idea that this setting, at which almost the entire film takes place, is sort of at crossroads of life and religion was likely centered in Andrew Lobel\u2019s script but it\u2019s tragically underdeveloped in the final product. Again, this kind of film needs to lean into its ideas and themes hard<\/em>. Don\u2019t hold back. Don\u2019t bury potential themes. Blast them loud and proud like the great films that inspired this one did. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cImmaculate\u201d feels like both a throwback to another era of Italian horror and a timely commentary on woman\u2019s bodily autonomy, but it can\u2019t match the flair of the former and lacks the thematic thrust to convey anything resonant about the latter. Star Sydney Sweeney continues her \u201cmoment\u201d after the success of \u201cAnyone but You\u201d and …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[48,47,37],"class_list":["post-1145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-horror-movies","tag-horror","tag-mystery","tag-thriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1145"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1145\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}