Movie Critic Christmas came early with Immaculate.
Sydney Sweeney’s horror passion project pays homage to genre classics, is a lightning rod for controversy, and sets itself up for plenty of cheap jokes (“Immaculate? Anything but!”). As many have pointed out, though, it also starts slow, is rich in clichés, and has a frustrating reliance on jump scares.
However, in the literal and metaphorical third trimester, Immaculate lives up to its namesake in one of the most important ways: it’s got one hell of an ending.
Set somewhere between Rosemary’s Baby and Suspiria–and riding off the bewildering success of The Nun films–Immaculate follows chaste Sister Cecilia, a born-again Christian who survived a near-death experience in her youth and turned to religion for purpose. After traveling to Italy for a new life working in a convent-meets-hospice-center, Cecilia soon encounters strange phenomena on the grounds and wildly different attitudes from the other sisters. The disorienting opening act culminates with the reveal that Cecilia, impossibly, is pregnant “without sin.”
For the first two trimesters (signaled literally in the film with superimposed text), events unfold patiently and deliberately–too much so for some viewers. As character motivations gestate and dominoes are put in place, it’s easy to drift into confusion, not unlike Sister Cecilia when confronted with intermediate Italian. It’s a first half that takes its time, and has a looming aura of “this better be going somewhere.”
But boy, does this film go somewhere.
Immaculate being released at all is a labor of love from Syndey Sweeney, now 26, who first encountered the material when she was just 16. Though the film wasn’t carried to term back then, the mark it made on Sweeney–and the miserable regression the US has taken in terms of women’s health since–drove her to resurrect the project. With input on the script, herself in the starring role, and her own production company in charge, it was clear that Sweeney wanted to deliver a specific message with this movie. And once the credits hit, there shouldn’t be a question in anyone’s mind about what it is.
Spoilers ahead.
Things begin to fully unravel near the third act (as if they hadn’t already) when Cecilia, experiencing complications but denied a real hospital visit, fakes a miscarriage to force her captors into action. Her escape is eventually botched, and with all lines of trust severed, the leaders of the convent unveil their hideous plan.
Early in the film, Cecilia is allegedly shown a nail used in the crucifixion of Jesus, one of the many unsettling and seemingly out-of-place details from the first act. In a shocking revelation, the nail is authentic–and still bears actual genetic material from Christ himself. Since the discovery, the convent has been used as a demonic breeding ground in a twisted experiment to try and bring about the Second Coming. Over two decades, the cult in charge stalked virgin women with vulnerable histories, groomed them for service, and then forcibly impregnated them with embryos containing the holy DNA. In a sickening image, Cecilia witnesses the stillbirths from 20 years of failure–before being twice-branded like a broodmare with a flaming crucifix.
Nearly broken, Cecilia musters up the courage for one final, mad attempt at escape. While the complicit Mother Superior tends to her burned and bloody feet, Cecilia bludgeons her with an ornate cross and manages to flee the room… just in time for her water to break. Despite her mind, body, and feet screaming out in pain, Cecilia continues her flight into the catacombs beneath and successfully destroys the engineered DNA used for the convent’s evil plot. She finally survives a desperate struggle with Father Tedeschi, the man who stalked and groomed her, before impaling him with the nail that started it all–ruining the original genetic material forever. Scarred in every possible way, Cecilia emerges from a birth canal-like tunnel and into the light of freedom, born again a second time.
But joy to the world, the lord is come.
In the moment of the movie–and Syndey Sweeney’s career–we watch in one unbroken closeup as Cecilia gives excruciating birth to the misbegotten product of her violation. She wails in agony, shreds her lungs, and uses her teeth to sever the umbilical cord. While the audience never sees what Cecilia sees, we can tell from her face and the inhuman noises below her that whatever she has just brought into this world does not belong in it.
Slowly, Cecilia picks up a nearby stone, takes a final moment to consider the anguished spawn before her, and makes her choice.
The rock comes crashing down.
While Immaculate is seeded with symbolism and metaphor throughout, there is nothing hidden about the perspectives and message of the film: it’s an allegory for the way women’s bodies are hijacked by societal structures to force them into physical and spiritual servitude. For all of the outward praise and worship the leaders of the convent lavish on Cecilia for her “miracle,” she is nothing but a vessel to them. They will wound, abuse, violate, and brand her like a cow. Her suffering is immaterial as long as her womanly duties are performed. Once we understand that the sickly, geriatric nuns whom Cecilia had tended to were cast-off failures of the experiment, the systemic nature of this belief and practice comes into full relief.
In the end, Cecilia undergoes the closest thing to hell you can find on Earth, and is forced to make a horrific, nauseating choice. But no matter how you feel about it–whether it makes you ill, jubilant, or anything in between–it was her choice.
In the opening moments of the film, Cecilia says she doesn’t view her fidelity to Christ as “a decision.” Immaculate, then, becomes the chronicle of how Cecilia reclaims her agency. We witness her violation, her confusion, her pain. We see system after system fail her. We stare deep into the unspoiled agony in her eyes as she manifests the physical representation of her torture. And, in the unforgettable final moments, we come to the same conclusion as Cecilia: no one should be able to make this decision for her.