Immaculate

Directed by Michael Mohan, Immaculate follows a nun (Sydney Sweeney’s Sister Cecilia) as she arrives at an Italian convent and soon finds herself confronted by sinister forces. It’s a familiar yet workable premise that’s employed to uninvolving, underwhelming effect by Mohan, as the filmmaker, armed with Andrew Lobel’s screenplay, delivers a sluggish and momentum-free endeavor that contains few, if any, wholeheartedly compelling elements and attributes – with the movie’s arms-length atmosphere compounded by Elisha Christian’s egregiously dim cinematography and a series of inscrutable, lackluster periphery performances (eg there’s not a single standout here, ultimately, and, making things worse, the accents ensure that much of the dialogue remains hopelessly impossible to decipher). (This is to say nothing, in terms of the latter, of Sweeney’s frustratingly flat turn as the wholly unsympathetic central character.) And while the picture admittedly does benefit from a gleefully over-the-top third act, Immaculate has, by that point, long-since worn out its welcome and cemented its place as a thoroughly misguided (and ill-conceived) misfire of palpable proportions. (That closing shot is an all-timer, though.)

*1/2 out of ****