Umm...maculate
Sydney Sweeney's unwanted-pregnancy horror film might actually have something to deliver
My journey of absolving myself from my life-long faith of Mormonism is a long one. And deeply personal, probably unique, forever something I’ll have complex feelings about. But watching the newly released Catholic horror film, Immaculate starring Sydney Sweeney, brought me something close to closure. Dare I say…validation?
Stripped down to its barest of bones, the story follows Cecilia, a faithful servant of the Lord seeking purpose out of trauma only to realize she, as a woman, matters very little in her faith of choice. Meant to be meek and humble, long-suffering always to the whims of men, her body only ever a vessel for their higher purposes, she eventually realizes that perhaps her holiest of callings is taking down the institution that would have her believe she’s powerless. Throw in some female rage, serious body autonomy, and fourth-wave feminism, and we’ve just made this ex-Mormon understand Catholicism.
Religion asks so much of women and we’re just supposed to take it. In fact, we’re supposed to want it. The supplication, the suffering, the pain. Blessed, after all, are the meek.
It is a sentiment Immaculate takes and confronts and then destroys in an absolute bloodbath. Christians are mad. Conservatives think they’ve lost another one. It’s not necessarily a great film, but it is an interesting one. I was surprised by how taken in by it I was. Grounded in realism like Midsommar with a healthy dose of camp outpaced by a feminist POV like The Invisible Man, Immaculate captures an interesting crossroads of faith and feminism. Instead of demons or the devil, all roads lead back to the original sin: men being unwilling to take responsibility for their own actions.1
“Immaculate isn’t one where she’s battling a computer-generated creature at the end of the movie. The evil is man, the evil is real, the evil is visceral and the evil is inescapable.” (Michael Mohan, Director)
Please note: spoilers abound
The movie is just about an hour and a half and the first two thirds are spent on generic suspense and cheap jump scares. It’s creaky doors, unnerving old nuns, shadows watching her sleep. But at the heart of it is the young American nun who came to take her final vows. Never mind that it reads a little strange to marry Jesus; things are about to get a lot weirder.
There’s a nail from the original cross.
There’s a lot of very young and pretty nuns jockeying for favorite.
There’s a mad-scientist-turned-priest entering his John Hammond era.
And there’s an unexpected barf that brings us to the titular twist: this young virgin is the new Mary blessed to carry the second coming of Jesus Christ.
She goes along with this ruse for far too long before finally questioning it all (#relatable!). And as she is isolated and traumatized and physically forced to lose herself to the mother role, the movie takes an enthusiastically pro-choice bend as it literalizes the toll of carrying a child you didn’t want and aren’t prepared for. Of course, she eventually realizes God’s spirit did not in fact visit her in the night but rather she was knocked up through a sort of Jurassic Park IVF process after pilfering some very sus DNA off this very sus nail of the cross. There she is, a literal vessel for something, told again and again she is less important than it by men—and women—who have no idea what it is to inhabit a body other people feel ownership over.
In the end, as she’s falling apart through the most grotesque symptoms of pregnancy (teeth falling out, nails rotting off) and emotional warfare (friends’ tongues getting cut off, a pretend miscarriage failing to earn her freedom), she sits in confessional challenging her would-be leader. “You know this isn’t the work of God,” she says, simmering as she rips apart a bloody fingernail. And the Father looks at her and says, “If this is not the work of God, why does God not stop us?”
Challenge accepted.
Her eyes light up with a new hunger, a realization that God might work in very mysterious ways and she might have found her purpose after all. In the throes of an (un)godly third trimester, she realizes submission is not all she is meant for. The next chance she gets, she takes a crucifix and beats her Mother Superior to death. She uses her prayer beads to strangle the Cardinal. And if the symbolism isn’t heavy enough, she eventually weaves her way through the pitch-black catacombs seeking a light at the end of the tunnel. But men aren’t done with her yet.
She is chased down by the Father determined to take the baby even at the cost of Cecilia. He straddles her, overpowers her, and in an absolute violation, attempts to cut the baby out. But it’s with a guttural scream and the holy nail itself, Cecilia stabs him in the throat and is washed red with his blood.
Though your sins be as scarlet and all that.
She claws her way into the light and the movie settles into its final two minutes with a single long shot of her giving birth, staring down at the thing we never see, finding the heaviest rock and, with a final scream, killing it as the screen cuts to black.
It could read as gimmicky. And it’s definitely counting on the shock value. Many a Christian didn’t know what to do with it (though Neon rightfully leaned into the pearl-clutching).
It takes on the father, the son, mother Mary, and the second coming of Christ all in about 79 minutes. I felt myself relating to it not because the plot made any sort of plausible sense but because of the deconstruction playing out in real time. Even if the scripture was different, the calling more extreme, holy words being weaponized to justify unholy means was a familiar brand of hypocrisy. And watching someone realize that the insistence of suffering could not, after all, be justified by the words and rites of men was validating. But in the end this movie wasn’t even really about Christianity for me. It was about female rage and how desperate the world is to contain it.
To me, there was something familiar about a woman only being as valuable as her body. That when that body no longer served the men around it, they smother it (a burying alive in the opening scene) or silence it (a tongue torn out after questioning the status quo). A woman should be safest when she defers to the powers that be—Reverend Mother, Mother Mary, a well-fed, well-cared-for Cecilia—but she is always replaceable, never safe (so a jealous nun throws herself off the roof when she realizes her body was not chosen). Even the way a convent is seen as a place to send the castoffs, the old and undesirable2 (the airport agents whispering “what a waste” when they see where Cecilia is going).
So much of our society is spent asking women to take up less space. We are expected to be quiet, to be kind, to be soft and demure and to only talk about our trauma as long as we don’t bring men into it. Beyond the submission, we are also expected to be wrapped up in what our bodies mean and say to the culture at large. Body positivity, leggings legs, clean girl aesthetic; purity culture, rape culture, constant hyper-sexualization; rulings, regulations, think pieces and political strategies—we are not allowed to just be; we are always adding to a discourse we didn’t ask to be a part of.
So as Cecilia realizes she can reclaim power even pregnant, even in labor, even as a God-fearing nun, the final act becomes a meta examination of female autonomy—especially with Sweeney at the helm.
Perhaps one of the more consistently objectified actresses of our day, Sweeney’s body is always on topic when it comes to her projects. She is sexualized, she is idealized, she is held up as sort of feminine standard by people who have no business deciding what her cup size means to the world at large. Be it SNL or Euphoria or conservatives feeling like they won now that the blond bombshell is back, Sweeney cannot exist without her body being discussed. So how right that she found herself obsessed with making a horror film equally obsessed with controlling her body. And how inevitable that I, a woman devoid of such extreme trauma, would still find validation in her turning the tables even at the cost of her purity.
The ending with its bloody delivery and gruesome abortion feels transcendent. Is it purely anti-Catholicism/religion at large? Was this directly sponsored by Planned Parenthood? Perhaps it’s simply about a woman using the rock of her faith (literal) to vanquish the antichrist. On a technical level, Director Michael Mohan describes the finale as “building to this moment of catharsis for her….It's pain, it's anger, it's frustration, it's release, it's relief.” It’s primal.
Like the final girls from Carrie, Ready or Not, The Invisible Man—there’s a determination to survive in spite of being told their lives are nothing valuable. They have been judged, they have been found wanting, and still they refuse to lay down and take it. In the end, laying aside the habit and the cross and the scripture, the film becomes a sort of allegory for female agency and feminist rage. Blood dripping, spit flying, a gurgled growl—
Fury, it relishes in saying, thy name is woman.
Sorry that Eve was the only curious, logical, intelligent being in that garden, but when push came to shove Adam straight up threw her under the bus because he couldn’t handle a little heat for HIS choices. (Source: Genesis According to Shelby)
“Get thee to a nunnery” says Hamlet, prince of mommy-issues, deciding all women are fickle and cruel and must be ferried away immediately cuz he can’t handle the truth (Source: Shakespeare According to Shelby)