Nuns, Gore and Resurrection - Immaculate reviewed

Immaculate, the Nunsploitation horror film that not only stars Sydney Sweeney but was produced by her as well, is the perfect rebuttal to producer Carol Baum who recently publicly attacked Sweeney saying that she wasn’t pretty and couldn’t act. Immaculate disproves both, as well as also showing Sweeney to be a canny producer with Immaculate grossing over $5.3 million in its opening US weekend.

Immaculate is set in Italy with novice nun Cecilia who has arrived from the US to join a remote convent. She is keen and excited to help her fellow sisters look after elderly nuns who are in ill health and to generally follow the path of righteousness. Not all is as it seems though as an early flashback sequence gives us a glimpse of the horrors to come as a young nun is shown having her legs broken by a group of masked nuns as she tries to flee the convent before being buried alive in a sealed coffin.

Back to the present, novice Cecilia is plagued by disturbing dreams before finding herself pregnant. As she is still a virgin, this can mean only one thing; an immaculate conception heralding the second coming. At least that is the view among the nuns and the priests that hold sway over the convent. Cecilia meanwhile is vomiting blood mixed up with some of her teeth and demands to see a ‘real’ doctor at a real hospital rather than be prodded and probed by old nuns and seemingly misogynistic and patronising priests.

They refuse and from here on Immaculate takes on a darker and more menacing tone evocative of Rosemary’s Baby and Suspiria as Cecilia tries and fails to escape. Whilst the controlling sisters and priests give up all pretence of legitimacy, branding the soles of Cecilia’s feet with the crucifix symbol and tying her to a wheelchair while her one confidante among the sisters, a young nun like herself, is brutally tortured and her tongue cut out in a scene straight out of films like Mark of the Devil.

Immaculate looks beautiful and set as it is, in an authentic Italian nunnery with real catacombs it feels ‘right’ and whilst lacking Nunsploitations’ other key ingredients of lesbian sex and gratuitous nudity, it more that makes up for that with some truly stomach churning scenes of pregnancy gore and epic blasphemy. Sweeney’s birthing sequence alone is worth the price of admission.

See it.