Immaculate (2024): A Missed Opportunity in Religious Horror
Immaculate (2024): A Missed Opportunity in Religious Horror
“Not every intervention is divine.” — And not every horror film with a great premise deserves your time. — 2/5 Stars
Immaculate (2024) arrives with a premise ripe for horror: a devout American nun, Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney), joins a remote Italian convent only to discover she’s been chosen for a terrifying divine purpose. The film flirts with powerful themes—bodily autonomy, reproductive control, institutional gaslighting, and the weaponization of faith against women. In the hands of a bold filmmaker, this could have been a Rosemary’s Baby for the post-Roe era.
Instead, director Michael Mohan and writer Andrew Lobel deliver a film that feels like it was focus-grouped into mediocrity, or never intended to be great in the first place. There are so many interesting ideas here—Cecilia as a modern-day vessel, the convent as a gilded prison, the Church as a patriarchal corporation—but the team behind Immaculate are almost defiant in their unwillingness to do anything interesting with them. What begins as a potentially incisive allegory about bodily autonomy and institutional control quickly folds under the weight of studio-safe choices: jump scares replace dread, exposition replaces ambiguity, and thematic boldness is traded for the hollow comfort of genre convention. This isn’t a film that failed to find its voice—it’s one that had its voice sanitized for mass appeal.
There are SO many interesting themes to play with—but the team behind Immaculate are almost defiant in their unwillingness to do anything interesting with them.
All Premise, No Payoff
The first act shows promise. The Italian countryside is lush, the convent is eerily pristine, and Sweeney brings a quiet sincerity to Cecilia that grounds the early scenes. But once the horror begins, the film collapses into cliché. Doors slam. Shadows dart. Nuns stare blankly. The “sinister secret” is telegraphed so early it ceases to be a mystery and becomes a waiting game—waiting for the film to finally commit to its own ideas.
When it does, the result is underwhelming. The climax—a would-be act of rebellion—feels less like empowerment and more like a perfunctory genre obligation. There’s no catharsis, no thematic resonance, just blood and a final shot that mistakes ambiguity for depth.
Sweeney gives it her all, but she’s let down by a script that reduces her to a reactive vessel rather than an active agent. The supporting cast—Álvaro Morte, Simona Tabasco—fade into the woodwork, their characters thinly sketched and their motivations unclear. Even the cinematography, which could have leaned into gothic grandeur or claustrophobic minimalism, settles for generic thriller lighting.
Final Verdict: A film with the bones of something great—but no muscle, no nerve, no soul. Immaculate squanders its timely themes and talented lead on a paint-by-numbers nun horror that will blur into your memory within a week alongside every other mediocre entry in this overdone subgenre. 2/5 stars. Skip it.
Official trailer for Immaculate (2024)
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