Immaculate

Sydney Sweeney is Hollywood's latest bombshell. She gained popularity due to the show Euphoria and the unfortunate side effect of that is she has now been unable to break herself from what I like to call the Marilyn Monroe effect. She is a gorgeous blonde that people immediately dismiss the intelligence and talent of. Last year she starred in Anyone But You, which I loved and think she did a great job in. And this year she took the leap and did something entirely different, Immaculate. Horror is a newer genre for her but I think she is built to be a scream queen, so let’s see.

So as soon as she gets to this convent she starts experiencing nightmares and randomly starts vomiting.

I will say that though the tone was set pretty clearly in the beginning the film isn’t doing anything to build or maintain it. We know it is a horror film, but there is no eeriness or tension present in the in between scenes. They are heavily relying on jump scares which seems lazy. Jump scares don’t work unless you fake us out a few times first, unless you build tension and they are just kind of throwing them in there out of nowhere.

So we are getting our film title from the fact that our lead girl is pregnant, though maintaining her virginity. Genuinely didn’t put that together until I started watching the movie, not where I thought this would go.

I love that there is the one character who is there out of circumstance and not out of her devotion to God. Allowing her to call out the weird shit that goes on at this convent.

So pregnant girl start bleeding, like a lot and it is way too early for this baby to be coming. She faked it. I love this, she wanted to escape so she killed an animal and used its blood to get them to take her to a hospital.

Sydney Sweeny is doing a really good job, I think any complaints about her acting are really unfounded. I think people see how pretty she is and stop thinking. Sure pretty privilege is real, their lives aren’t that hard blah blah blah. But we’ve seen this over and over again now. Beautiful, smart women with talent get reduced to their looks and dismissed. Marilyn, Pamela Anderson, and now Sydney Sweeney. And she is still really young, the other two women who have followed this path were ABUSED by the industry and the general public and I hope that doesn't happen to Sydney.

Okay so yes this convent is in fact crazy. They are really an experimentation center to see if they can impregnate a woman without her having to have sex. They’ve done this to all the novices, and this is just the pregnancy that took. They’ve been doing this for decades because the super old nun had the same brands on her feet. Ew.

She starts fighting back at the very end here, as she is labor. I love that for her. She burns this evil priest to death along with his creepy ass lab so that’s cool.

As a film it's fine, pretty middle of the pack. There's some decent commentary in here about how some religious people value birth over actual life. But as a horror movie the elements are a little weak. Not that the narrative itself isn’t scary, but the delivery really isn’t. The jump scares were overused, and there needed to be music or silence that helped build the tension. Overall it's about a 6/10, it's definitely watchable, but probably only the once.