Immaculate (2024)

Immaculate arrives with the quiet confidence of a film that knows exactly which buttons it is pressing and would prefer we not mention the pressing. Sydney Sweeney, who also produced under her Fifty-Fifty Films banner, plays Sister Cecilia, a novice who survives a drowning, takes it as a sign, and accepts an invitation to a remote Italian convent. The convent has other plans. What follows involves a stolen relic, a virgin pregnancy, a geneticist turned priest, and a great deal of blood on marble. It is a nunsploitation revival with better lighting and a marketing budget.

The film's central machinery is the forced impregnation of a woman by a religious order that regards her body as a vessel for its own ambitions. Critics drew the line from that premise to the post-Roe moment, and the line is not difficult to draw. Cecilia's arc ends in violent self-reclamation, a woman taking a rock to the thing the institution made of her. The director, Michael Mohan, has insisted the movie carries no social message and that any conversation should be started by the audience, a position that keeps the sermonizing at a minimum even as the subject matter does the arguing for him. The result is thematically loaded but rhetorically restrained.

Where the film declines to participate is in the broader catalogue. There is no racial commentary, no economic critique, no environmental anxiety, no LGBTQ subplot, no neurodivergent character, no historical revisionism, and no case for body positivity despite all the body horror. The antagonist is a corrupt religious order, not a system of capital. The cast is European and largely female, which is a practical consequence of the setting and the producer's star power, not a statement. Immaculate wants to frighten people, not instruct them, and it mostly does. A horror film can hold an unmistakably feminist premise while keeping its mouth shut, and this one does, right up until the final scene, where it opens its mouth and screams.