However, these fade into the background as the film wanders into more effectively suspenseful territory, Mohan using darkness and light to intriguing ends. There is an over-reliance on jump scares, which are only intermittently effective because, as audience members, we’re trained to expect them (and tire easily if they don’t pay off). While Sweeney tackles Cecilia’s journey, her longtime collaborator Mohan directs the ever-loving hell out of Lobel’s script, drenching every frame in color, light and shadow, sending cinematographer Elisha Christian’s camera swooping around the characters, into coffins and down dark hallways. As this swift, 89-minute film builds to an absolutely feral climax, we do believe her, perhaps most of all in the film’s final, jaw-dropping moments, as she embodies a pure animal honesty. It’s something of a wonder to watch Sweeney as she undertakes Sister Cecilia’s journey, transforming from a meek naïf into something unexpected and wild, her pious discipline falling away with every indignity. She wants to remind us how dorky she isĪfter working together on the erotic drama “The Voyeurs,” Sydney Sweeney and director Michael Mohan create a religious thriller premiering at SXSW. Movies Sydney Sweeney is in a new horror film. She has no choice but to carry this pregnancy to term, surrounded by jealous novitiates, senile nuns, controlling male leadership and a secret sect of the sisterhood who wear crimson shrouds over their faces. Her spontaneous conception is seen as a miracle, the resurrection of God. Soon, shockingly, she’s exhibiting pregnancy symptoms, her womb thrumming with a whooshing heartbeat under a sonogram machine. Sweeney stars as Sister Cecilia, a doe-eyed and docile devotee from Detroit who has traveled to Italy at the behest of a Father Tedeschi (Álvaro Morte) to take her vows at a secluded convent where she will care for elderly nuns. He skews toward modern horror filmmaking but has the references and deep film knowledge to make “Immaculate” feel more like a long-lost video nasty dredged up out of an obscure VHS archive. Still, Mohan wants “Immaculate” to be an exploitation flick and so it is an exploitation flick, which means he has adorned Lobel’s script in texture, atmosphere and viscera, taking the genre seriously while also applying an ironic wit. Starring Sydney Sweeney (who also co-produced the film), this cheeky, freaky, lushly designed horror movie presents as a giallo nunsploitation riff, but the script, by Andrew Lobel, is much more “Rosemary’s Baby” than it is “The Devils.” Blood-soaked and candlelit, Michael Mohan’s “Immaculate” disabuses the notion that any conception is ever without sin.
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