What a year for Sydney Sweeney. She was brilliant in the real-life thriller Reality, scored a big box office hit with the critic-proof rom-com Anyone But You, and now shows off her Scream Queen credentials in Immaculate - a convent-set horror whose prologue features the biggest set of keys you'll see in either this life or the next. Subtlety, it must be stressed, isn't the MO here.
With an ominous wind blowing (you may feel quite the stirring during the proceedings yourself), Sweeney's wide-eyed Cecilia arrives at an Italian order's countryside HQ to take her vows. But no sooner have the gates closed than all hell breaks loose for The Hot Nun.
Sweeney and director Michael Mohan previously worked together on the erotic thriller Voyeurs, and they make a bankable duo here: a star-turned-executive producer who leaves nothing back in her trailer and a filmmaker who, for the most part, knows his genre onions. This blasphemously bonkers outing plays like a cross between the infamous 1970s Armchair Thriller series Quiet as a Nun (check out the attic scene online and marvel how it was ever shown on ITV pre-watershed), The Omen, and, bizarrely, The Devil Wears Prada, thanks to a scene-stealing turn from Giulia Heathfield Di Renzi's Sister Isabelle. More please!
Immaculate goes big on bloody shocks to the detriment of old-school drama - the film's one big sin. It wraps everything up in under 90 minutes when the story could have easily had the fright-night faithful on the rack for another 20. In Mohan's rush to the outré-and-then-some finale, things that go bump in the night are neglected. So too is the scope for Thorn Birds-style tension between Sweeney's Sister Cecilia and Álvaro Morte's Father Tedeschi, a man who looks like he's doing the sunbeds in between pulling the strings.
You may well cop the twist early on, but if you're front row for this holy show, that doesn't really matter. You'll still get your money's worth - a soul full of tropes - from a movie that would have been banned here not too long ago.
