See Sydney Sweeney as a Nun Having No Fun in the Demonic Immaculate Trailer

It’s fair to say Sydney Sweeney is having a moment right now. The young actor has been on the cusp of legitimate stardom for a few years after doing memorable work on HBO’s Euphoria and the first season of The White Lotus—although it was her little-seen foray into verbatim cinema via Tina Satter’s Reality that really impressed us. But after Anyone But You turned out to be the sleeper box office hit of the holiday season, with the picture grossing $101 million worldwide as of press time, it seems Sweeney has finally broken through, and she has the social media stanning over a Hot Ones appearance to prove it.

Which might be a longer way of saying Sweeney’s current rise brings a lot of attention to her next project, and luckily for genre fans it is a devilishly good-looking chiller by the name of Immaculate. A new horror film from writer-director Michael Mohan, whom Sweeney worked with previously in 2021’s The Voyeurs, Immaculate looks absolutely bonkers in all the right ways.

Starring Sweeney as Sister Cecilia, a young nun who is in search of a purpose that accompanies her love of God, Immaculate tells how a Sister in Christ discovers that she has been blessed (or cursed?) with immaculate conception. Just like Mother Mary in the Good Book. Things, however, do not appear so good for poor Cecilia as demonic visions give way to horrifying imagery involving priests, nuns, and monstrous hands reaching through confessional booths.

On the surface, Immaculate might look like another spiritual and thematic remake of Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968), a film that famously starred Mia Farrow as a young woman condemned to carry to term the spawn of Satan. And at a glance, Immaculate could indeed replay that scenario with priests and nuns of dubious morality around Sister Cecilia taking umbrage over the apparent sacrilege of Cecilia’s miraculous conception. Perhaps some less devout apostates hidden within the flock are even wishing to force her to carry the abomination to term? (That ironically seems to be the general direction of this year’s forthcoming Omen prequel in April). 

Yet the trailer’s loose suggestion of psychosexual imagery evokes another Polanski film, 1965’s Repulsion. This causes one to wonder if there is more than meets the eye in Immaculate’s familiar setup. Could Cecilia’s visions in fact be her delusions, a la the severely underrated Saint Maud (2019)? Or what if the real horror isn’t that Cecilia has conceived the Devil’s baby, but rather if she really has immaculately conceived in a truly biblical manner? The Bible technically speaks of a second coming, but would a patriarchal system that has ruled the Christian world for millennia be genuinely welcoming to a new messiah upsetting the status quo?

There could be a lot of fun in Immaculate’s concept, albeit Sweeney’s nun will be having none of it. We’ll know more when the film opens on March 22 in the U.S.

Also fun fact: the picture likewise features Simona Tabasco who starred in the second season of The White Lotus.