Immaculate

Many films have tried to capture the grandeur and style of classic Nunsploitation and Italian Giallio films but few succeed. Some films get lost in the weeds aping style over providing substance. Some think a banger soundtrack can make up for poor plotting and performances. Or some films just don’t know what they want to be failing to generate any scares. With the right talent behind the camera, a rising star ready to stretch, and enough politically charged themes, Immaculate proves to be a provocative and shocking release, but perhaps not as successful at everything it tries to accomplish. 

Set on her journey in serving our deal lord and savior, Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney) leaves her home in Detroit, MI for rural Italy taking on a post at a convent caring for elder nuns in their last days. Recruited by Father Sal Tedeschi (Alvaro Morte), Cecilia is set to take her final vows and serve, but something isn’t quite right about the convent. When Cecilia shockingly discovers she is pregnant, it’s determined to be an immaculate conception heralding the second coming of Christ. Could it be truly God’s will, or is this child the abominable design of a more sinister force?

There’s a lot going on in Immaculate, a lot to unpack and analyze and that’s not easy to do without digging into some big spoilers. So in that light, please forgive me for being purposely vague with the rest of my critique. To put things simply, it's a hell of a show and not for everyone! Shooting at the famed Villa Parisi, home to such films as Blood for Dracula, Burial Ground, and several other productions sets the stage for everything one can expect. It’s a beautiful, moody, and atmospheric location perfect for a politically and religiously-charged horror film with heavy Giallo black-gloved cinema overtones. And the film delivers some genuinely disturbing imagery, some solid scares, and one of the best final screams to pierce our ears in long time. 

It also happens to be the home to another similarly-themed 2024 horror film - The First Omen. Immaculate and The First Omen touch on many of the same ideas and themes, even sharing a few plot beats but they go about things in very different ways. I liked them both a lot but it’s a damned shame they were released one on top of the other with little box office breathing room. It’s easy to argue they cannibalized their financial successes. 

In the wake of overturning Roe v. Wade, both Immaculate and The First Omen touch on themes of female autonomy in the eyes of a foreboding theocratic society. This new form of “female body horror" is a refreshing break from the over-played “Grief Horror” that became increasingly tiresome. Both films feature some horrifyingly traumatic birth sequences and shocking imagery while honoring past horror films. Thankfully their respective differences allow them to stand apart while sharing the same shooting locations.

Director Michael Mohan and Star/Producer Sydney Sweeney deserve a lot of credit for having the gumption to go all in. When Andrew Lobel’s screenplay was first making the rounds, Sweeney actually auditioned for the film when she was 17, but the project fell apart and went dormant for a decade. With her star on the rise and looking for a challenge, she resurrected this project and brought abroad her The Voyeurs director to bring it to theaters. Watching it you can spot the inspiration points the film pulls from, but wisely does its own thing and takes its own path into religious-themed horrors. 

And while I enjoyed this film a great deal, I didn’t fully love it. I was all for it through about three-quarters of its speedy 89-minute runtime. But then it explains the how and why of what’s going on and feels like a leap too far. I didn’t need a reveal. I thought the reveal cheapens the film a bit pulling back the impact of its weightier themes and ideas. While the film didn’t need to be a slow burn, at less than 90 minutes, I thought it needed to tap the breaks to let more mood and suspense build and amp up that sense of claustrophobia and tension as the walls close in around Sweeny’s Cecilia before getting to the true horror of the final act. 

Small misgivings and missteps aside, I am impressed with Immaculate. It knows when and how to set up and deliver shocking imagery. It doesn’t waste its location and production values. Sweeney delivers a great performance here, arguably one of her best efforts to date. The creepy score from Will Bates maintains a sense of oncoming doom without only relying on stingers to add impact to the visual frights. It might not be my favorite horror film of 2024, it’s still too early to dispense with that honor, but it's one I'm glad to have caught in theaters and make space for in my collection. 

Vital Disc Stats: The Blu-ray 
Immaculate conceives its first Blu-ray release here stateside with a single-disc Blu-ray from Neon. pressed on a Region A BD-25 disc, the disc is housed in a standard single-disc snapper case with identical slipcover artwork. The disc loads to trailers for previous and upcoming Neon horror releases before arriving at an animated main menu with standard navigation options.

For such a visually arresting film, I’m not sure I fully understand the reasoning for how Immaculate was released on disc here in the States. It’s already confounding that we’ll have to import the 4K from Germany, but to stuff this movie on a BD-25 disc is just odd. Granted, at 89 minutes, it’s not a long film, but it would absolutely benefit from some breathing room.

This was shot digitally at 6K and finished on a 4K master, and it should look far better than it does here. The image looks as though a grain filter was applied to give it a more “film-like” look, but often this transfer makes it look like some very rough digital noise with quite a few compression artifacts. This is especially an issue in darker, shadowy scenes (of which there are many), this noise can almost appear crunchy and fine lines and details suffer. I saw this twice in the theater and it looked nothing like this. While some fine details in facial features, clothing, and the iconic Villa Parisi do come through nicely, those moments are reserved for daylight scenes. The darker the scene, the noisier and flatter it looks without really any suitable shadow depth. Overall it’s an okay, passable transfer but I suspect the 4K Dolby Vision release from Capelight due in just a couple of weeks will look significantly better. We'll be reviewing that as soon as we get hands on a copy. 

As for audio, we’re treated to a subdued, but creepy and effective DTS-HD MA 5.1 track. Given the convent location, the biggest and loudest sounds are reserved for the bigger action and scare sequences. Sounds of our nuns singing or the dining scene after Cecilia takes her vows offer an effective spread of audio effects into the sides and surround channels. Dialog is clean and clear throughout without issue. Half the cast speaks Italian so there are automatic English subtitles for those moments. The score from Will Bates is a great accompaniment to the piece offering plenty of creepy mood enhancements for the feature. All around a clean and immersive mix.

Bonus features for this release are frustratingly thin. The only extra is a very good audio commentary from director Michael Mohan. He may fly solo here, but there’s never any dead air or slow spots as he easily details various pieces of inspiration and the processes of executing various sequences or how certain shots pay tribute to various Giallio films. With that, I’d loved to have seen some making-of materials, interviews with the cast and crew, etc. We don’t even get a trailer! 

• Audio Commentary featuring Michael Mohan

I liked Immaculate when I saw it in theaters. Enough so I went back for seconds. As an actress on the rise, I thought Sweeney really stepped up to the plate to deliver a real performance. I haven’t seen everything she’s been in, but this is the best I’ve seen from her so far. As a producer, this film showed she had a real eye for an interesting idea and to her credit wasn’t afraid to explore the realms of theocratic horror and female bodily autonomy. I wish Michael Mohan had paced the venture a little better, it didn’t need to be in such a rush, but it was an effective excursion all the same. This Blu-ray from Neon though is a bit of a whiff. Stuffed onto the smallest disc possible, the transfer suffers from too much compression harming a visually impressive film in the process. While the audio is solid, the lack of extensive bonus features is another letdown for such a provocative flick. Honest advice is to wait and see how the German 4K disc turns out, otherwise, all I can say is this disc is Worth A Look