It isn’t often that the very last shot of a movie feels like its raison d’être, maybe the entire reason the film was made in the first place. But then, last shots don’t come much more proudly outrageous, more obscenely showboating, than the moment on which Immaculate loudly ends. Love or hate this gory blast of clergy-centric horror hokum, there’s no ignoring its parting provocation: a long close-up of star Sydney Sweeney, drenched in blood, screaming through a simulation of labor, until she tears her teeth through the umbilical cord, stumbles over to find a heavy rock, and uses it to crush the cooing abomination that’s just emerged from her uterus. All in one shot. Cut to black, because what’s left to show us after that mic drop?
You have to wonder if screenwriter Andrew Lobel wrote the ending first and then worked his way backward, like a mystery writer reverse engineering a whodunit. In retrospect, so much of Immaculate feels like mere prelude to its Grand Guignol finale — some 80 minutes of setup designed mostly just to get us to the shocking punch line. It’s often said that you can lose the audience along the way and still win them back at the finish line. Immaculate takes that principle to a new extreme; it’s like a death-bed plea to the gorehound gods after a lifetime of sins.
Until the third act (or third trimester, as the movie labels its last chapter), the film is diverting, mildly effective schlock. It follows Cecilia (Sweeney), who comes from the suburbs of Michigan to Italy to join a Catholic convent. After a series of ominous encounters — including a restless night of bad dreams that evoke Rosemary’s Baby, one of the movie’s chief influences — this virginal novitiate discovers that she’s mysteriously with child, a modern Mother Mary immaculately impregnated. Novel as the experience is for her, the spookiness surrounding it is as familiar and dog-eared as scripture: creepy nuns, ominous robed figures, lots of cheap jump scares. Horror fans have been down the halls of this monastery before, and they’ve seen much more effective variations on its jolts.
Then again, there’s some sense to how Immaculate plays by the (good) book until it doesn’t. It’s riffing on the tropes of traditional satanic horror in order to subvert them, eventually revealing the Catholic church — pious defenders of humanity in superficially like-minded thrillers, the last defense against the forces of darkness — as the real villain of the story. And there’s a certain nutty charge to the late revelation about the baby growing inside Sweeney’s Sister Cecilia: It’s neither God’s work nor the devil’s, but rather a crazed mistake of mad science. She has been impregnated with the genetic material of Christ himself, harvested from the spikes driven into his wrists on the cross, in order to serve as incubator for His return.
Immaculate’s tilt out of generic-religious spookiness and into something closer to biological horror also unleashes Sweeney’s latent scream-queen talent, a feral intensity lurking beneath the habit. Truth be told, she’s not terribly convincing in the earlier scenes — either as someone fully ready to give her life to the church or someone mistaking her trauma (a childhood close encounter with death after she fell through some frozen ice, almost meeting God right there and then) for a calling. Are we meant to boo and hiss when another nun (Giulia Heathfield Di Renzi) accuses her of not taking this major life-changing choice seriously? Because that’s certainly the vibe Sweeney puts out there; she evinces the half-hearted conviction of an undergraduate switching majors, not someone who’s about to give up everything in devotion to her faith.
But once the horror of Cecilia’s predicament sinks in — once it becomes clear that she’s carrying a lab-made messiah — the Euphoria alum leans into the shrieking panic. And it’s fun to see her muck with her image as a newly minted movie star in something like real time: Mere months after the sleeper success of Anyone But You made her America’s new sweetheart, Sweeney has dashed that reputation on the rocks with the playfully blasphemous spectacle of her birthing a deformed clone of Christ and then disposing of it via the paranoid right-wing talking point of after-birth termination. It’s like if Meg Ryan appeared in In the Cut the same year she blew up with When Harry Met Sally …
And there’s an extra-righteous serendipity to the performance and that ending. Immaculate, through pure happy coincidence, arrived in the immediate aftermath of a bizarre viral moment for Sweeney: the seemingly coordinated effort to position her blondeness and buxomness as some kind of victory against wokeness. Multiple articles in right-leaning rags fixated on Sweeney’s cleavage, post–Saturday Night Live appearance, as the antidote to “politically correct” body positivity — as in, thank God a white woman with big breasts has come along to show the world what real beauty looks like again. Keyboard conservatives, still smarting from the realization that Taylor Swift was not the muse of their culture war, placed their hopes and dreams on Sweeney instead — not because of anything she’s actually said or done, not because of any movie she’s made, but because she fits the basic bombshell profile of what they think a woman should look like.
The gist of this whole dumb campaign was an attempt to use Sweeney’s image for the purposes of propaganda — to transform her, without her consent, into an icon of “traditional” femininity and a walking, talking indictment of progressive values. Immaculate smashes that plan as decisively as Sister Cecilia crushes her monster offspring. It’s obvious (to most) that no one involved with the film could have anticipated how the online right would try to weaponize and politicize Sweeney’s fame. But if the timing is accidental, the film still rejects the very entitlement lurking behind that attempt. It’s a horror movie about conservative zealots engineering a Second Coming to secure their own power and impose their moral worldview, all by laying claim to a woman’s body and trying to use it to their own nefarious ends — a theme that must have resonated with its lead actress. After all, Sweeney auditioned for the part a full decade ago, when she was all of 16, and helped rescue the project when it fell apart, purchasing the rights to the script, handpicking Michael Mohan to direct, and serving as producer as well as star. Immaculate is as much her film as anyone else’s.
And that, in a way, gives the ending the shape of a personal statement. The film, on a whole, isn’t aiming for much more than shock value; it wants to press buttons with its gross-out audacity, to flirt with sacrilege in the multiplex. But in its showstopping final shot — a pantomime of forced childbirth and a symbolically pro-choice rejection of the same — it does reach for a certain post-Dobbs political rage, as blunt as the rock Sweeney lifts over her head. Cecilia, bathed in the blood of her oppressors, rejects her part in some larger fundamentalist scheme and reclaims her bodily autonomy on the most certain, graphic terms. Wokeness isn’t dead, but mutant baby Jesus sure is.
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A.A. Dowd , 2024-04-11 19:18:31
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