Immaculate is a scary good time

Like heavy metal, religion is a great thing to pair horror with. 

Immaculate is the latest entry into the spooky religion sub-genre and can be best described as Paul Verhoeven’s attempt at making a giallo movie.

Having scary stuff happen in a dimly lit religious setting is always a recipe for a good time and Immaculate delivers in spades – with some pleasingly nasty gore to boot.

Sydney Sweeney stars as a young nun who makes the trip to Italy to serve in a convent when mysterious horror stuff starts happening.

Trying to describe the plot of Immaculate is a bit moot because the plot isn’t the main thing in a horror film; you judge it either by how scary it is or how bananas it gets.

By those merits, Immaculate is one of the more demented mainstream films we’ve seen in quite some time.

There is enough gore to please the horror heads and Sweeney proves she’s one of the most engaging stars around right now.

Above all, Immaculate has a delightfully anarchic energy that sets it apart from the pack.

In certain scenes, you can nearly hear the film wink at the audience to remind them they’re also in on the joke, and Immaculate gets very silly in the final stretch.

If you’re on board with the film at that stage the final 15 minutes will have you cackling like a maniac.

The film feels like the halfway house between Dario Argento and Paul Verhoeven, so if that kind of maximalist chaos is your bag, Immaculate delivers in spades.

It is a tribute to Sweeney that she got this film off the ground and lent her star power to it, because it is difficult to imagine this film being made otherwise.

And thank god she put her clout behind the film, because there is nothing quite like seeing a film like this with a crowd and reacting to the chaos together in real time.

Evil Dead Rise pulled a similar trick last year, if you deliver the gore and some good scares people will show up in their droves.

The ending of the film is destined to go viral on social media as soon as the film hits streaming, but we would encourage people to see this in a cinema; the communal shock is something to be cherished.

Immaculate won’t be on our year-end top 10 list and is not designed to win Oscars so take this review with a pinch of salt; we are recommending it on the grounds of it being an entertaining movie and not because we think it’s an artistic masterpiece.

Cult films are what keeps the world of cinema spinning, and a cult horror film is worth its weight in gold.

We are much better off as a culture for having films like this still playing in cinemas; if nothing else, it will be a great watercooler movie at the office.

“Did you see that Sydney Sweeney nun movie where someone gets their tongue cut off?”