Master of Nun: IMMACULATE and THE FIRST OMEN

Immaculate is all about Sydney Sweeney. This Euphoria and White Lotus highlight has taken a whirlwind tour of genres on her way to movie-stardom in the last couple years, starring in the compelling true-crime transcript-play Reality, the amiably junky B-level superhero flop Madame Web, the charming sleeper-hit rom-com Anyone But You. She’s turning into something of a reliable leading lady. Now here she’s a novice nun from Detroit assigned to small-town Italy. And then she turns up pregnant—an immaculate conception whispered about in hushed tones. If you guess there’s some kind of gnarly Catholic conspiracy underway, with she the unwilling victim, you’d be right on the mark. This puts the entire film’s stress on her increasingly frightened face, framed in tight habits and tighter close-ups as she escalates a freak-out. It’s a neat little horror package that manipulates its religious iconography with sick twists and subtle jabs until it all spills out in quick splatters and some nasty, if conspicuously out-of-frame, implications. Sweeney holds the screen in every scene, stretching her big eyes and quivering lips, teasing out a fine compliment of hushed confusion, squeamish doubt, and burgeoning realizations. One believes she’s slowly awakening to the depths of danger in which she finds herself. Director Michael Mohan proves a steady genre hand on the reins, finding the slippery sinister angles, burbling choral echoes, and artful arrangements of blood and violence to keep the convent creepy. His previously collaboration with Sweeney was a similarly small-scale horror effort The Voyeurs, which similarly resuscitated an older mode—in that case the sexy thriller—with some red-blooded earnestness. It’s fun to see Mohan and Sweeney really going for it with some nunsploitation, and, though it misses opportunities to make the other characters pop more memorably or really ramp up the sleaze, they once again turn up some modestly enjoyable echoes of old thrills.

Even better is The First Omen. This is a strong work of horror iconography attuned to genuinely gripping and upsetting consequences. It takes the expected trajectory of a franchise play and uses its familiar trappings to actually dig down deep into the creepiest and most unsettling corners of its premise. It also might be one of the most Christian movies in recent memory, especially if you count how many times it made a squeamish audience member in my screening murmur, “Oh, Jesus.” This much-belated prequel to 1976’s blockbuster creepy-kid, childhood-of-an-antichrist horror picture takes its ideas as seriously as its genre, and therefore earns every shivery image. (Once you see from where a ghostly hand emerges, you won’t soon forget it.) Its images aren’t just free-floating fear, but add up to a movie awash in the implications of a young woman losing control over her mind and body, with many hands wanting to interfere in her reproductive potential for devilish purposes. 

Director Arkasha Stevenson’s feature debut creates a palpably paranoid setting, the austere Gothic architecture and winding cobblestone streets of Old World seriousness jangling with a period-appropriate flurry of student protestors and conspiratorial heretics and Catholic whistleblowers and nervy novitiates and troubled teens and cute Italian paramours and prickly priests. She pushes the camera into blocking and art direction posed with a casual sense of shivering suspense, the characters seemingly drawn inexorably into the terrible fates that await them. There’s a wooziness to the film, a nightmarish quality that sleepwalks into darkness from its extreme slow-motion opening violence to its eruptive finale. Between is pure, stylish unease. And that’s a hazy contrast infecting an otherwise precise eye for the procedures and rituals of the time and place—and then the fiery and bloody effluvia that spouts off in the most unsettling moments. It has a handsome, filmic look that makes the shadows stormy with danger, and the close-ups freckled with slow-dawning emotional confusions. The innocent nun at the center is Nell Tiger Free, whose severe stare betrays brewing doubts even as she draws closer to what she thinks is a kind of spiritual salvation, all-too-slowly aware of the hellish designs these evil clergy have in store. Though our knowledge of the franchise might keep us ahead of her, Free’s steady embodiment of her character’s emotional and spiritual state is so compelling, and the ensemble of expert character actors around her (Sonia Braga, Ralph Ineson, Bill Nighy) so commanding, that the inevitable somehow feels surprising anyway. If only all prequels played so vivid and pointed and involving.