Immaculate

dir: Michael Mohan

2024

Damn. And I thought I hated the Catholic Church.

I mean, no, there’s no doubt how much I loathe the Catholic Church, but the makers of this flick have an even keener and more creative way of getting back at that august, malevolent institution that’s been treating, amongst so many others, women like crap for millennia.

Don’t get me wrong – I know that other cultures, other religions are just as awful about women, and their perceived status as helpmeets and handmaidens to those that matter (men), if not more so – but, wow, the Catholics refined their misogyny and used the words of God to justify all sorts of fuckery against women right from the get go.

And they’re still fucking at it, don’t forget that the Catholic Churches motto is, in reality, whatever nonsense they preach about the wisdom of St Augustine or St Thomas Aquinas, they barely considered women above dogs, writing that women were defective and incomplete men.

Regardless of their veneration of Jesus’s mum, and maybe because of it, their loathing for women was a feature, and not a bug, right from the get go. It’s been used to justify all the awful things that men do to women, but worst of all, the justification for trying to disallow by law women’s bodily autonomy, as in, the right to decide what to do and when to do it with one’s own body.

I had no idea that was even a theme in the flick up until the “turn” happens, and it’s a mighty one, and perhaps, in retrospect, not all that surprising considering the title.

Sister Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney) arrives in Italy from the States. She is ushered into the welcoming bosom of a convent whose main purpose seems to be looking after the elder nuns who are suffering physically or mentally the ravages of age. Many are on the way out, so their noble task is bringing them comfort until their last days, when they presumably fly on up to heaven and, I dunno, have group sex with Jesus finally.

Is…Isn’t that what they’ve been waiting for? I mean, they’ve been married to Jesus for so long, finally they can get some satisfaction.

Cecilia is a bit of a strange one. She believes in her vocation, she believes, due to a childhood accident, that God called her to service, for something important.

And maybe He did, who knows? Depending on whose perspective you look at the script from, if you believe in an interventionist god, then you could argue that God’s will was that she grow up in the faith, take her vows, and then be used by the Church in some monstrous way.

Or, on the other hand, He sent her there to stop them.

Everyone is nice and harmless and devout at the convent until they aren’t. Perhaps the biggest red flag in the beginning is the Hot Young(er) Italian Priest (Alvaro Morte) who welcomes her in, translates for her (she doesn’t know that much Italian, naturally, because an American who speaks Italian, or any language really, would probably not be that relatable to American audiences), and gently mocks the other nuns or priests or cardinals for her amusement.

I thought right from the start that he was a walking red flag, but that’s the thing with these men of the cloth – the red flags just keep on coming. Also, he used to be a man of science before deciding that empiricism and the scientific method aren’t shit compared to the fevered dreams of lunatics two thousand years ago and guessing the intentions of an invisible bearded guy in the sky.

Danger, danger Sister Cecilia! After some mysterious and confusing goings on, all of a sudden all these fancy religious types keep berating Cecilia, demanding to know whether she’s been with a man.

That’s a bit… personal. A lady never tells, let alone a nun. Cecilia doesn’t push back and tell them it’s none of their fucking business, but all the same she assures them all that she’s never known the fumbling touch of a grateful but incompetent man as yet.

Shocked, shocked they are by this information, because, wouldn’t you know it, she is pregnant. Just like the Lady Immaculate, the Virgin Mary, this is a remarkable example of parthenogenesis.

So, I guess for a bunch of people who believe in magic / the supernatural / the grace of God, something miraculous like this is more believable. If it isn’t believable, they can take it on faith. If something doesn’t make sense, just have faith. Faith makes everything possible.

But, see, fundamental to religious practice, and faith, is the reality that the people involved are lying to you. And Cecilia can’t see it until it’s almost too late.

Maybe some part of her wanted to believe that Jesus himself or the Holy Spirit saw her as being so intensely holy that they thought she was worthy of being knocked up all over again. But hey, this is a horror flick. A pregnant virgin nun is going to have to do what pregnant virgin nuns have to do, in a horrifically violent flick about how worthless the Church sees women’s autonomy to be.

A flick like this could only be put together by someone who grew up in the Catholic faith, I’m telling you now. For a good long while I was watching this thinking “hmm, they really haven’t gone as hard against the faith as I thought they would have” until it’s like “yeah gods, they really viscerally fucking hate the Catholic Church”. Saying that the body horror aspects of the flick almost carry more weight than the moral horror of doing something like this to any person, let alone this woman, WITHOUT HER CONSENT, doesn’t negate just how gruesome the flick is in parts. Some is implied, a lot is shown, and some almost feels like “eh, something shocking hasn’t happened in a while, why don’t we cut out someone’s tongue?”

The last section of the flick has less in common with the curious sub-genre of horror that is Catholic horror (The Exorcist, The Omen, The Pope’s Exorcist, and is more aligned with standard revenge upon a set of jerks / cultists / cannibal hillbillies that won’t let you leave a place of your own accord.

Until the very ending. I’m not going to spoil those last few minutes, but, my gods. Any doubts anyone could have about Sydney Sweeney’s commitment to this role fly out the window. That primal scream of rage seems to channel, at least for me, all the rage, the rage of centuries, of behalf of the countless women abused by the Church, of the children abused by the Church.

And it does not end on a note of forgiveness, of forbearance, of acquiescence, oh no. Most horror flicks fuck up their endings, but I’m telling you this now, for free, that Immaculate absolutely nails its ending.

All this deliverance of divine wrath could not have happened to a worse or more deserving bunch of people. Sydney Sweeney is having her moment this year, seemingly being in five or six films released in the last couple of months, and I’m not in a position to compare or contrast or say anything about anything other than she knows exactly what she’s doing, and why she’s doing it as this strange character.

If the other characters aren’t as well drawn, or drawn at all, and if they don’t seem like real people, it doesn’t really matter. Their purpose isn’t to live and breathe as characters: It’s to either try to harm Cecilia, passively observe her, or get run the fuck over by film’s end, if it be Her Divine Will.

This was a fun, caustic take on women’s rights beneath eyes of a malevolent Church that should have been burned to ground centuries ago.

8 times and if you think I’m joking then tell me more about those parts of the world where embryos now have more rights than women out of 10

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“If this is not the will of God, then why doesn’t God stop us?” – said every awful religious person ever - Immaculate