Immaculate

In cinemas now

Sydney Sweeney’s rise to fame has been meteoric since her breakthrough role in HBO’s racy teen drama Euphoria. After showcasing her comedic chops in season one of The White Lotus and excelling in Tina Satter’s claustrophobically tense Reality, she makes her horror bow in Michael Mohan’s Immaculate, presumably in an attempt to underline her credentials as a leading lady for all occasions.

Co-produced via Sweeney’s production company Fifty-Fifty Films, Immaculate is evidently a star vehicle that aims to showcase its leading lady’s range and, in that sense alone, it works well enough. Sweeney fully embraces her role as a nun that quickly discovers the remote convent she has joined is harbouring malevolent secrets, as demonstrated by the film’s bloody final act.

However, Andrew Lobel’s formulaic screenplay means the clandestine plot of Immaculate is actually far from shocking, but rather the latest in a seemingly endless conveyor belt of ‘evil nun’ movies. While the film is clearly indebted to genre classics such as Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen, it is closer in execution to more recent bedfellows such as last year’s senseless Evil Dead Rise, with predictable jump scares and violence taking precedence over character or plot development.

While Sweeney’s undoubted star power ensures Immaculate remains watchable throughout, it isn’t enough to stop it from being almost entirely forgettable.