Immaculate stars the gorgeous Sydney Sweeney as Sister Cecilia, a soon-to-be nun, who flies from the U.S. to Italy to receive her vows. The monastery in question isn’t the one from Audrey Hepburn’s The Nun’s Story (1959) though. Instead, it operates as an evil headquarters hellbent on impregnating its young nuns with…? I’m not sure.
The plot, like all the latest horror fare, is far from original. Basically, the nuns are evil and trying to make the virgin Cecilia birth an evil baby.
She befriends another nun named Sister Gwen (Benedetta Porcaroli) who plays the typical “Strange things happen around here” character. Of course, the character belongs in this story considering the nunnery has spent eons trying to impregnate its nuns with….I don’t know. Whatever it is it’s evil and maybe even born of Christ himself. The nuns are in ownership of one of Jesus’s crucifixion nails that contains his earthly bone fragment DNA. It seems this is where some of the supernatural forces that impregnate Cecilia with the evil baby stem from.
The priest in charge is Father Sal Tedeschi (Álvaro Morte) who is the evil mastermind along with his geriatric hench-nuns. It’s basically Rosemary’s Baby (1968) in a monastery except that plot is coherent. Here it’s not said what the baby is (i.e., the antichrist?) like in Rosemary’s. We just know it’s something bad and she’s been taken prisoner while all of the other nuns view her as the new Virgin Mary(?). Gwen even becomes homicidally jealous and attempts to drown her. She’s jealous of birthing an evil entity?
There’s so many more questions still. How is it evil if it’s born from Christ’s DNA (if a God can have earthly DNA to begin with)? Is this a renegade monastery that split from the unaware otherwise holy Catholic Church? Maybe the church is aware? What’s the goal with the baby? World domination? Making a fortune on sports with the help of an almanac? It’s never answered.
Big time spoiler alert!
She kills the baby at the end! The heroine murders, not only down and defenseless old nuns and a priest while escaping, but an infant with a massive jagged rock. This has to be the most blatantly pro-choice horror movie ever made. Even Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby can’t bring herself to stab the infant antichrist to death.
Father Sal is killed justifiably I guess. She burns down his evil lab and then stabs him in the neck with Jesus’s nail to blood spurting results. It’s an exact copy and paste of Clarence Boddicker’s (Kurtwood Smith) death in Robocop (1987).
Even though there isn’t a blatant political agenda in this some man hating jokes make their way in. The raw sewage pipe that resides underneath Gwen’s nose spews an old feminist joke about God obviously being a man because the world sucks. Beyond that I understand there were feminist critics claiming this movie is an allegory in support of patriarchal liberation through abortion. So, killing a baby with a rock is an abortion? Got it. This isn’t as funny as when they accused The Exorcist of being sexist back in the 70s.
I’d love to see Hollywood make a movie about the Prophet Muhammad just like this. Nonetheless, I’m shocked this got made considering we live in an alleged Christian dictatorship.
It’s not an impressive movie but it is competently made and nicely filmed. Don’t expect a hot and steamy nunsploitation movie with a naked Sweeney though.
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