Immaculate – Film Review

Director – Michael Mohan
Writer – Andrew Lobel
Stars – Sydney Sweeney, Álvaro Morte, Simona Tabasco

We meet Sister Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney) on her way to join a convent in the Italian countryside. She is a beautiful young woman but has chosen the life of a nun after a near-death experience. She was trapped under ice after an accident as a child and didn’t breathe for several minutes. She thinks God brought her back to this world for a reason, and that is to serve Christ in the only way she knows, a life of servitude in a convent. She arrives at the Convent and initially, everything seems perfect. As time progresses she starts to notice some unusual happenings at night in the convent!

Sydney Sweeney has been making waves in Hollywood in recent times with her appearances in Euphoria, the surprise hit rom-com Anyone But You and even the much-abused Madame Web.  While this film will not appeal to as wide an audience as some of those above, it does show her versatility as an actor.

This does feel like a side project from White Lotus with both Simona Tabasco and Sydney Sweeney in the cast. Sweeney is also one of the producers of the film under her Fifty-Fifty Films company. The production was filmed in Rome in 2023.

This film starts slow and other than the odd jump scare and moment of body horror, there is little to spook the average viewer. It only really gets going in the later stages of the piece, and yes, it does get going! The writer Andrew Lobel has come up with something wonderfully far-fetched and it’s hard not to enjoy the madness as it unfolds. It’s worth seeing this film without any prior knowledge of the twists, I’ve seen some reviews that totally give the plot away. If you’re a fan of the horror genre, especially from the ’70s, this is worth seeing in the cinema.