Stuff and Nunsense Sydney Sweeney’s Elevated-nunsploitation vehicle ‘Immaculate’ is more or less what you’d expect, and refuses to take its religious concepts seriously Immaculate is fortunate to be the first of two identically-trailer’ed nunsploitation films (best of luck to The First Omen), about demon babies carried in the womb. It winks political, but not forcibly enough to imply it doesn’t know its subversion is decades old, imparts now-stock slomo symmetry in equal measure to jumpscares, and seeks crowd pleasing (read: public groupthinking) diversion as its means of atheist enlightenment, while still courting cosmic themes. As you might expect of such wishy-washiness, it only succeeds sporadically. The most interesting “cinematic” idea in the film is, thankfully for most people who will be seeing it, what Sydney Sweeney brings to the occasion. Despite her now well-established career, she retains all the amateurish unaffectedness of a complete non actor; guileless and sweet, a consummate ingenue. She has an uncanny ability to deliver swears (her “Goddammit” upon water breakage got a chuckle from me) as well, as even through genuine nicety she’s well aware of her, ahem, more Mature qualities, and playing to them at all times. Placing her as a fish out of water in literally hallowed halls shows surprising conceptual forethought on her lucky common collaborator director Michael Mohan’s part. The rest of what he displays is a flair for tonal play (my audience ate up the jokes and exploitation bits) and a rare, highly-themed accent image, typical of so-called “elevated horror”. The highlight of the film is a nun’s subtly contorting face under candle light. A “devil” figure putting out flames with the smokey mist of a fire extinguisher also finds poetry. Mohan doesn’t shy away from gore either, granting each instance thereof a satisfying display and duration; the grimy specificity of its aesthetic makes it a highlight of the film. The Internet recently memed Mohan for saying he wishes to avoid nudity in his Sweeney collabs, which seems like a complete squandering of its refreshing willingness to court nunsploitation in the first place. The genre has a pretty clear avenue to play with sexual tension (see its originator The Devils, 1971, from Ken Russell), but Mohan’s concept desexualizes (and stigmatizes) pregnancy, even as a sexual interrogation of the immaculate conception is both in line with the cheeky tone he crafts and a much more productive provocation. As St. Vincent once sang, “Let’s do what Mary and Joseph did/without the kid.” Instead, pretty early in Immaculate, it’s apparent the Eponymous Conception is in fact artificial, and Not So Godly! The nefarious plot, once the movie reveals it, is actually highly esoteric in concept and deserves much more exploration than the film allows, intent on pursuing its Manichean condemnation as part of its exploitation build, unaware that it can have it both ways. It needn’t even access the popular “Villain With a Point” mode, though that’d be the easiest way to do it; simply enriching the character, and the madness of its Dr. Frankenstein shenanigans, would do it. But around the time Immaculate imparts the grand “Aha” to us, the film, its logic and pacing and relative political magnanimity have all come loose. Alas, immediately as the jig springs up, it begs the question: why not just get someone to do this willingly? It’s the same rhetorical skip that far too many Handmaid’s Tale-addled antinatalist activists skip, that other people’s pregnancies, which they’ve no intent to allow to overtake their own bucking sovereign uteri, aren’t the body-horror invasions they fear, but are, in fact, beautiful! It’s not the case here, but the point is, when is it the case in modern media, that fetus, mother, and indeed father might find the harmony that not so long ago was its expected condition of reproduction? Is the sinister Baby Gesserit of Dune Part Two the best reminder of that love we can get? The other night, I had the privilege to see one of the full-stop greatest films ever made, The End of Evangelion, at the same theater, which naturally destroyed me. It’s a film whose religious terror is so horrifying, so soul-invasive, yet and so restorative and yet still so bleak, all for its acceptance of the idea that such prophecies may come true. Believers or not, the sheer power of The Lord and His ultimate unknowability is beyond what we can fathom or emotionally contend with. Would that a modern film from Christian nation America would follow Shinto/Buddhist Japan and allow itself to turn to His soul piercing gaze, even, as Hideaki Anno did, to convey the ego-killing anxieties of doing so! Immaculate, amongst nearly every Hollywood offering invoking the Lord’s name, has no such ambition. The cockpit-womb of an Eva mech beckons more existential, less nihilist viewers.
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