In 2021’s The Voyeurs, writer and director Michael Mohan mined the depths of trashy ’90s erotic thrillers to create his own take on the subgenre and almost pulled it off. 

He re-teams with that film’s now-ubiquitous star Sydney Sweeney for Immaculate, which plays in the popular pocket of religious horror involving nuns and Catholic iconography. In fact, during the pre-roll before this movie, a trailer appeared for The First Omen, another nun-based supernatural shocker debuting in theaters April 5. Last fall, The Conjuring Universe entry The Nun II scared up $270 million at the box office, so clearly there’s still plenty of holy water left in the well for making those women in black robes even more intimidating. 

Despite its artsy intentions, Immaculate simply doesn’t do enough to distinguish itself from the packed crowd.

Sweeney plays Cecilia, a devout young woman who travels from Detroit all the way to the countryside of Italy to join a convent that also serves as hospice for dying nuns. She finds friendship in the rabble-rousing Sister Gwen (Benedetta Porcaroli) and mentorship in the unassuming Father Tedeschi (Álvaro Morte), who extended Cecilia the initial invitation to the nunnery. Almost immediately, she begins having ominous visions and troubling nightmares, all made worse when it’s discovered she’s somehow pregnant, despite never having sex. Unable to come up with an explanation, Cardinal Merola (Giorgio Colangeli) deems the occurrence a miracle and tasks the nuns with giving Cecilia everything she needs to welcome this miraculous baby to the world. But their care becomes constrictive and Cecilia begins to suspect something sinister.

Though Mohan seemed to make a meal of his influences previously with The Voyeurs, Immaculate is much more self-serious by comparison and doesn’t embrace any potential camp in the premise. That’s a perfectly reasonable tack to take with this material, but the issue is he doesn’t do enough new with the actual story beats to justify such a stone-faced attitude. From the portentous cold open that foreshadows the predicament of our protagonist, the film is one moment after another of visual or sonic clichés that we’ve been trained to sniff out through years of movie watching. If a character is holding a lantern to light a room, you can get sure the wick will somehow get blown out, and if they’re using a flashlight to pierce the darkness, you can be sure the batteries will act up.

Undoubtedly, the biggest draw for most people to Immaculate will be the presence of Sweeney, who also serves as co-producer and worked for years to get the script by Andrew Lobel turned into a feature. She’s in nearly every scene and is certainly acting her heart out, but there’s always this nagging feeling that her commitment to the role would fare better in a movie that really deserved it. 

Between her star power and the actual quality of the performance, Sweeney is one of the primary aspects that makes Immaculate watchable for long stretches. She hasn’t done much horror in her career — although the Amazon Prime original Nocturne is worth checking out — but she certainly makes a case here that she could do plenty more. If one of the film’s concluding scenes isn’t an audition reel for “scream queen,” I don’t know what is.

I just don’t quite know what exists at the screenplay level that screamed for this story to be told. There’s some subtext about female bodily autonomy and the patriarchal hold on religious leadership, but none of it is realized in a way that seems especially subversive or meaningful. The film’s grueling final scene could ruffle some feathers, but it’s not a conclusion that feels earned on the merit of what came before it. 

Most of the runtime is made up of admittedly eerie setups with tacky jump scare punctuations, scored with detuned piano plinking by composer Will Bates. Sound design is an underappreciated art in horror cinema, and while there are moments of tension aided by some creepy cues, there are also other spots where stock sounds just don’t do the trick. 

Though its title suggests brilliance and excellence, Immaculate just doesn’t stack up.

New movie releases

• Coming to theaters is Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, a creature feature starring Rebecca Hall and Brian Tyree Henry that focuses on previously untold origins of the Titans and Skull Island while finding the titular monsters uniting against a mysterious Hollow Earth threat.
• Streaming on Netflix is The Wages of Fear, an action thriller starring Franck Gastambide and Ana Girardot about an illicit crack team that has 24 hours to drive two truckloads of nitroglycerine across a desert laden with danger in order to prevent a deadly explosion.
• Premiering on Apple TV+ is Steve!, a two-part documentary that chronicles the life and career of Steve Martin, from his early struggles and meteoric rise to revolutionize stand-up to the current golden years of his acting era.