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The Tense and Gruesome Immaculate Is an Art Film at Heart
Sydney Sweeney, however, is spectacular as a pregnant nun suffering the tortures of the damned.
(“You’re very sweet,” she also tells Cecilia, before icily adding, “I don’t mean that as a compliment.”) The film opens with a flashback to another young nun attempting to escape the convent under cover of night and then having her legs broken against the steel bars of the gate by a group of mysterious figures. When our heroine winds up inexplicably pregnant, despite the fact that no men have been allowed near her, the church leadership decides it’s another immaculate conception, and she goes from a lowly servant of God to the prospective mother of a potential new savior — an object of semi-worship put on a (literal) pedestal, vested in elegant robes, her hair done in curls. The director — whose previous film with Sweeney, 2021’s The Voyeurs, was a subtler variation on the De Palma–style erotic thriller, and who also made the surprisingly nerve-wracking 2012 Lizzy Caplan rom-com Save the Date(a personal favorite) — has always had a refined approach to visual storytelling, but he can also shift his style enough not to betray his chosen genre.
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