I don't think more than five minutes had elapsed at the start of Immaculate (2024, directed by Michael Mohan) before I started thinking about the Magdalene laundries and residential schools. What goes on in the convent depicted in this film is not so far outside the actions of the actual Roman Catholic Church that the film can be dismissed as mere exploitation. Don't get me wrong, it IS exploitation, but that's beside the point. It has such theological and ideological axes to grind that it was bound to find Evangelical Christians and devout Catholics and right wing trolls of all sorts squawking when the film reached its end. This film hasn't got time for their bullshit. It has a particular shape of reality it wants to express and it uses bludgeons to present it. It's crude, but it's brutally effective.
Note: there are spoilers here.
The plot follows American novitiate Sister Cecilia traveling to the convent in Italy where she will take her vows. Cecilia has felt a deep religious calling since surviving a drowning in childhood during which she was "dead" for several minutes before being revived. She has been invited to the convent by Father Tadeschi, and in due course takes her vows. The convent is a hospice for nuns at the end of their lives. Cecilia feels a bit adrift at first, given that her Italian is poor. She befriends Sister Gwen, who speaks English. As she explores her new environs, she notices strange occurrences. Some of the nuns have crosses branded or scarred on the souls of their feet. The convent's private chapel is a reliquary in which, she discovers, is one of the nails used in the crucifiction. One night, she dreams of hooded figures gathered around her against which she has no ability to resist. Afterward, she finds that she has become pregnant, though her maidenhead is intact. The other nuns view this as a miracle, save for Sister Isabella, who attacks Cecilia and tries to drown her before throwing herself from the roof of the convent. The pregnancy goes poorly for Cecilia, and when she loses a tooth, she demands to be taken to a hospital. Father Tadeschi refuses. Meanwhile, the old nuns who are the convent's patients begin to view Cecilia with religious awe. Sister Gwen, however, takes a stand against her superiors, and pays a price for it. After faking a miscarriage fails to liberate her from the convent, Cecilia becomes resigned to her fate, especially after her own feet are branded to keep her from escaping. But she's got a plan. She bides her time until right before her labor. When she manages to escape her confinement, she discovers the true horror of what the Church has planned for her...
One right wing reaction to Immaculate holds that star Sydney Sweeney was shoved into this film because she was popular among conservative Christian men and that the film is intended to degrade her in the eyes of that audience and make them sad in their pants. I am sincerely skeptical of her alleged popularity among this demographic because have you actually seen Euphoria? I mean, really. And nobody shoved Sweeney into doing anything. She originally auditioned for the role a decade ago, never forgot it, and bought the rights herself to get it made. It's right there in the credits: Producer Sydney Sweeney. It is fair to say that the actress herself has an ideological interest in the film. The elephant in the room when listening to these kinds of critics is that this is a film about abortion and reproductive rights that is categorically opposed to the anti-choice right and to the Catholic Church and Evangelical Christianity more generally, all of whom it views as anti-woman and anti-life. And because it was released by a small distributor--Neon has a history of releasing lefty content (they release films by Laura Poitras, for crying out loud)--it comes to the screen more or less unfiltered.
I confess that I don't really like devil movies or possession movies most of the time. They usually act as propaganda for religion, for Christianity, and for the Catholic Church more specifically. This film acts in opposition to that impulse. It's about time that impulse was questioned. The Exorcist, after all, came after a decade of upheaval created by young people and its central thesis was that foul-mouthed young people were driving the world to hell in a handbasket almost literally and the only way to stop it was to coerce the acceptance of the authority and supernatural power of the Church. It paved the way for the politics of the Reagan era. Its effect still echoes in contemporary politics (more on that in a moment). So I welcome a countervailing narrative.
It doesn't take a detective to see this film as a reflection of the Dobbs ruling overturning Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court of the United States in 2022. A woman who is forced to carry a baby not of her making by a patriarchal Church? Yeah. That's obvious. This film re-writes the end of Rosemary's Baby with the mother nipping things in the bud in the way that Rosemary Woodhouse should have done once she saw that her baby had "his father's eyes." Perhaps less obvious is a broader culture war being fought over religion and secularism. This is a film with overtly religious themes, but it is hostile to religion in a way that its contemporaneous fellow traveler, The First Omen, is not. In spite of its trappings, this is not a devil movie. This is a "God" movie, where the villains of the piece are trying to engineer The Second Coming. Even dressed up in horror movie trappings, this is nakedly opposed to the project by the religious right to bring about exactly the same thing in the real world outside the movie screen. The Evangelical project in Israel, for one example, is inspired by this very impulse. The Jews must remain in Israel/Palestine for Jesus to return in their framing of the end times. Immaculate is a film that both speaks to its moment in time and is of its moment in time.
The genre horror here functions in three other separate keys beyond the reproductive nightmare it presents. At the outset, it functions as a paranoia thriller, in which its central character doesn't know who to trust and who is blocked at every turn from saving herself by people she trusted. It also functions as a Christian version of a folk horror film. The scene where Sister Cecilia is dressed up as the Madonna and worshiped by the nuns who are in on the plot is of a piece with Florence Pugh's flowery get up in Midsommar. The ultimate plot, in which a priest who used to be a geneticist attempts to clone Jesus Christ from the blood remaining on one of the nails used in the crucifixion is the sort of thing Nigel Kneale might have written if he had had a taste for irreligious mockery. All of these strains weave together with the dominant narrative to create a bigger picture that is so much more horrible than any of these ideas alone. Each narrative twine leads to Sister Cecilia biting the umbilical cord that ties her to their plot, to the Church, and maybe to faith generally. She does this both figuratively and literally. The villains here would have done well to heed their own holy book, which says that no man knows the hour of the second coming, that it will come like a thief in the night.
I know plenty of people who question whether or not Sydney Sweeney is a good actor or not. I get that. She has a tendency to mush her words like a teenager and some viewers won't like that. But for this film, she's fine. She performs every emotion she's asked to perform. The final scene, when she finally gives birth and has a choice to make, asks her to go beyond where most actors will usually go. She's up to the challenge and performs it with a convincing mix of pain and horror and rage. She absolutely nails the landing. The scene where she fakes a miscarriage as a means of escaping the convent also works because Sweeney is even up to acting that she's acting, which is not an easy thing. Moreover, the rest of the cast has few native English speakers, so they throw Sweeney into stark contrast. She's on her own in this movie. She holds the camera.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I am a seriously lapsed Catholic. The Church has done so much evil in the world, from preventing Catholics from using condoms in the Global South in the face of HIV to the Magdalene Laundries and residentials schools I've already mentioned to sex abuse scandals without number to financial shenanigans through the Vatican Bank to its complicity with fascism during World War II to its role as the handmaiden of Colonialism and so on and so on, that it's impossible for me to recognize it as a moral authority on anything. It's certainly impossible for me to recognize any moral authority on matters of bodily autonomy. This is a church that used to castrate young boys to preserve their voices for singing in the Church's choirs, after all. Seriously, the last castrati died in the 20th Century, so it's NOT a medieval practice. The gall it takes to tell someone what they can and can't do with their own bodies after that boggles the mind. There is a more personal element to this, too: My mother had a pregnancy before I was born that ended in a miscarriage. She was as hardcore a Catholic as anyone I've ever known, so she followed to the letter the Church's guidance on the matter. It almost killed her. My older brother, who saw all of this, left the Church as soon as he was of age because of this, but my mother stayed the course. We had hostile conversations about abortion when I was a teen, as if she had never been put in harm's way by her religion. So, basically, films that say bad things about the Catholic Church appeal to me. This one hits that itch JUST so.
Welcome to this year's October Horror Movie Challenge. I'm participating in my friend, Aaron Christensen's annual fundraiser during this year's challenge. Apropos of this particular post, Aaron has chosen the Women's Reproductive Rights Assistance Project again as this year's recipient for our community's largess, so if you've got a few bucks lying around, here's a donation link for the donor drive. You know what to do.
As usual with the challenge, I'll be prioritizing films that are new to me, so I'm off to a good start there. I'll also be prioritizing pre-Code, silent, and older international horror this year, because during the last few decades, the genre has gotten too big to really track. We'll see how it goes.
My current progress:
New to me films: 3
Total films:5
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