Reviews

It hasn’t been long since we last saw her in the movies Anyone But You and Madame Web, but Sydney Sweeney is already back with Immaculate.

In Michael Mohan’s horror, Sweeney plays Cecilia, an American nun who accepts a place at a remote convent in Italy. She realises the convent is not what it seems when she miraculously falls pregnant.

Horror fans will be excited to know that Immaculate delivers the goods. It isn’t particularly scary (although there are a few jump scares) but it makes up for that with buckets of blood, brutal kills, gory violence and wince-inducing body horror moments. The atmosphere is also unnerving, chilling and increasingly tense.

The horrifying moments ramp up as the film – and Cecilia’s pregnancy – progresses and builds to an audacious final act. In particular, the final five minutes are very extreme, making for one of the most disturbing and shocking horror endings in recent memory.

Once it reaches that point, you can’t help but wonder what the film could have been like if Mohan had used that outrageous approach the whole way through. But at least we get a taste for it at the end.

Immaculate is only 89 minutes and it whizzes by in a flash. The story wastes no time and sticks with the essentials, which works fine if you’re just after a mindless horror. But more exploration of the convent and its evil inhabitants would have been appreciated, as well as more on the creepy nuns in red masks.

This isn’t Sweeney’s first horror – she’s already made Nocturne and Night Teeth – but this one really establishes her as a scream queen, quite literally. In a two-minute unbroken take, she delivers one of the most raw, guttural, prolonged screams you’ve ever heard. It’s quite something!

Immaculate takes a while to get going but it becomes more and more exciting and entertaining throughout. This is definitely one to see with a crowd.

In cinemas from Friday 22nd March

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