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Immaculate’s Ferocious, Gross-Out Ending, Explained

Sydney Sweeney fully commits to a playfully blasphemous, Grand Guignol spectacle.

Love or hate this gory blast of clergy-centric horror hokum, there’s no ignoring its parting provocation: a long close-up of star Sydney Sweeney, drenched in blood, screaming through a simulation of labor, until she tears her teeth through the umbilical cord, stumbles over to find a heavy rock, and uses it to crush the cooing abomination that’s just emerged from her uterus. And it’s fun to see her muck with her image as a newly minted movie star in something like real time: Mere months after the sleeper success of Anyone But You made her America’s new sweetheart, Sweeney has dashed that reputation on the rocks with the playfully blasphemous spectacle of her birthing a deformed clone of Christ and then disposing of it via the paranoid right-wing talking point of after-birth termination. Multiplearticles in right-leaning rags fixated on Sweeney’s cleavage, post– Saturday Night Live appearance, as the antidote to “politically correct” body positivity — as in, thank God a white woman with big breasts has come along to show the world what real beauty looks like again.

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