Avis des critiques

Michael Mohan and screenwriter Andrew Lobel deliver sometimes great, sometimes goofy scares during a tight 88-minute runtime. There’s an admirable commitment to big swings, but it can sometimes feel like the film gets in its own way with odd pacing and quiet reservation where there should be a chaotic clamor.

Despite the best efforts of DoP Elisha Christian to create a striking visual identity, the film ultimately brings little to well-trodden cinematic ground, even in its hell-for-leather finale. It’s a shame, because Immaculate sets up some interesting threads... but these give way to a more cliche idea that isn’t developed or pushed to extremes enough to be novel.

As an atmospheric thriller, [Immaculate] has all the trimmings: creepy, candlelit corridors; mysterious catacombs; nightmare visions of black-cloaked figures; and impressive bursts of gore. But it’s also reserved in surprising ways. For all its moments of shlocktacular flair, it’s an art film at heart.

Instead of twisting the storyline to try to make a point about, say, the church’s stance on abortion, Mohan and Lobel treat the institution’s misogyny as a given. That gives them the freedom to spend the movie’s fleet runtime riffing on classic Catholic miracle stuff... and showcasing Sweeney’s Easter lily freshness.

A really charismatic actor can supercharge even the most stolid genre fare, and that’s what Sweeney pulls off as the innocent but fast-learning Cecilia. Her arc from chaste and trusting to blood-caked and severely pissed-off turbocharges this workmanlike horror.

Sweeney alone is reason enough to dig into Immaculate and its world of secret sins and often surprising gore. Even without its star, it’s a solid enough horror endeavor, but with Sweeney, it’s compulsively, thrillingly watchable.

Immaculate is certainly disgusting, but only in a good old-fashioned scoop-their-eyeballs-out fashion... Mohan’s romp is at home to a fierce economy that allows few breaths to be taken. It would be nothing without a charismatic star at its heart.

What Mohan has largely done [in Immaculate] is whip up a genre pastiche that shrewdly combines horror-movie frights, paranoid-woman thrills and the special kinky pleasures of 1970s-style nunsploitation... “Immaculate” doesn’t try to reinvent anything but instead cheerfully embraces the familiar, which is part of what makes the movie enjoyable.

In terms of adding another layer to Sweeney’s resume, “Immaculate,” at least for what it tries to accomplish, doesn’t qualify as a waste of time, but nor is it likely to possess much of a shelf life. Basically, it’s the kind of small movie that gets made once an actor’s services are very much in demand, though Sweeney probably shouldn’t let that impulse become a habit.

This cheeky, freaky, lushly designed horror movie presents as a giallo nunsploitation riff, but the script, by Andrew Lobel, is much more “Rosemary’s Baby” than it is “The Devils"... [Mohan] skews toward modern horror filmmaking but has the references and deep film knowledge to make “Immaculate” feel more like a long-lost video nasty dredged up out of an obscure VHS archive.

f anything, [Immaculate] is a great showcase for Sweeney’s range (she gets to go from somewhat meek to primal scream) and is full of interesting visuals, beautiful costumes and accomplished makeup work showing all manner of bloody, mangled faces and limbs. But it’s also a movie that does not seem as sure of itself or the point it’s trying to make.

The only thing this second-rate scarefest truly succeeds in doing is giving Sweeney a hell of a showcase... When that last-gasp freakout finally comes, leaving you bug-eyed and jittery, you’ll thank your respective deities that at the very least, Sweeney has sacrificed all in the name of your guilty pleasures.