Immaculate review – Sydney Sweeney plays scream queen in gory nun horror

Some movie stars disappear behind their roles. Not Sydney Sweeney. The Euphoria and Anyone But You actor is the kind of familiar presence whose pop cultural imprint is so large that it threatens to trample over her characters. It doesn’t help that Sweeney rarely if ever switches up her distinct millennial drawl or the endearingly self-conscious way she carries herself, which practically breaks the illusion and invites the conflation between her own public persona and the people she plays.

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For some movies, that could be detrimental. But Immaculate, a fun and nasty little throwback to Rosemary’s Baby and giallo films like Suspiria, is all the better for it. Sweeney, who somehow avoided a scream queen role for so long, plays dress-up as a virginal young nun. Her Sister Cecilia mysteriously becomes pregnant and is then imprisoned by a rabid convent that believes she’s carrying the second coming.

The movie is essentially about nefarious forces feeling entitled to a young woman’s body, and imposing their own meaning on it. That’s a role Sweeney, with all the attention her classic pinup dimensions attract, can knowingly bring herself to. Her star-making role in the trauma-fest that is Euphoria both poses as a comment on objectification, while also contributing to her objectification – she reportedly had to push back against some of the many nude scenes creator Sam Levinson wrote for her.

Earlier this month, Sweeney appeared on SNL poking fun at how eyelines in her direction tend to trail south during a skit where she played a Hooters waitress excelling at her job for obvious reasons. A rightwing columnist even laid claim to Sweeney’s body recently, writing in the conservative Canadian newspaper National Post that her hotness was the death of “wokeness”. Apparently, kneejerk lefties, who democratize beauty standards, can’t stand anything bigger than a B-cup. With all that in mind, Sweeney’s fight for bodily autonomy, against religious fanatics in Immaculate, transcends the screen in a way most B-movies like it could only pray for.

We meet Sweeney’s Sister Cecilia as she’s travelling to Italy, where two male border agents are the first to eye her up and down. They make comments to each other in Italian about what a waste it is that she would devote her body to Christ. Cecilia, who has yet to learn the language, catches their drift. Her entire pious, covered-up demeanor already feels like her response.

Cecilia is figuring out her spiritual purpose while moving to a convent in a gothic Italian countryside, which serves as a retirement home and palliative care for older nuns. Death is in the air even before Immaculate gets to the creepy shadows shuffling in the night and starts dispensing with nuns in violent scenes that director Michael Mohan presents with stomach-turning intensity.

Immaculate isn’t above the basest pleasures a nunsploitation movie can provide. Mohan, working from a script by Andrew Lobel, luxuriates in simple jump scares, bodily disfigurations and the hoariest genre tropes at his disposal. These moments can be both laughable and refreshing. There isn’t the oppressive seriousness of the so-called “elevated horror” trend here. Instead, there’s the reckless abandon of a schlock fest, happy to play in the shadow of its influences, both high and low, from Suspiria to The Stepford Wives.

But Mohan’s direction also carries reminders of early work from Jaume Collet-Serra (House of Wax, The Shallows), another slick genre craftsman whose visual choices feel more intentional than mechanical. In Immaculate, Mohan tends to follow graceful shots with grisly closeups, as when a nun dives from the convent’s roof, and we lean in closer to see her mangled face against the pavement.

Sweeney, a producer on Immaculate, recruited Mohan, who previously directed her in The Voyeurs, his silly but effective throwback to Rear Window and 90s erotic thrillers like Basic Instinct. In that earlier movie, which like Immaculate is Verhoeven-lite, Mohan cast Sweeney as a woman who isn’t just objectified, but whose almond-eyed gaze can do the objectifying. He’s a film-maker who is far more fixated on what Sweeney can do with her eyes, which is a lot. Remember her sleepy, cutting stare in The White Lotus?

Watch them in Immaculate: how they widen with fear or tear up in defeat; and how, when Sister Cecilia pushes back against the patriarchy during the “my body, my choice” section of her jaw-dropping journey, Sweeney’s eyes harden with a defiance that’s so passionate it feels personal.

• Immaculate is out on 22 March in US and UK cinemas, and on 21 March in Australia