Immaculate

Director: Michael Mohan (Italy, USA). Year of Release: 2024

A woman praying furiously and asking Jesus for forgiveness. She sneaks into a neighbouring room where an elderly man is sleeping. Trying not to make any noise, she fishes out a keyring from a drawer next to his bed. She tiptoes out of the large building and tries one key after another in the padlock on the iron gate. As she opens the gate a little, four hooded figures approach her. She tries to squeeze her body through the gap but is pulled back. Her leg breaks with a sickening smack.

Cut to: the same woman desperately lighting a match. There’s not much room above her, in fact there is little space around her at all. It’s as if she’s been buried alive in a coffin. The match dies out, and she desperately tries to light another. There’s a little more light, but no obvious solution to her predicament. With increasing agitation, she screams into the void for help. No-one is going to come to her rescue. Opening credits roll.

Cecilia is having difficulty getting out of the airport. The inflexible men on the counter insist on checking all her papers as she has only got a one-way ticket, paid for by the local convent. Cecilia is originally from just outside Detroit, but following a childhood incident when she was technically dead for 7 minutes, she has pledged her life to God (“what a waste!” say the stereotypically Italian airline workers). As congregations in Michigan fall, a smooth-talking cleric has invited her to Italy.

The Our Lady of Sorrows Convent is not very welcoming. The officious sister Isabelle reluctantly breaks her other activities to show Cecilia her room. The main function of the convent is to help elderly and often senile nuns on their short path towards a reunion with God. This means that the place is full of scary, gibbering, former nuns, who Cecilia often encounters in the middle of the night. When this happens, she has to break whatever she was up to and escort them to their bed.

While Cecilia is having a piss, sister Guendalina (“you can call me Gwen”) breaks into the bathroom for a crafty fag. Gwen became a nun to escape an abusive relationship (“he hit me, and I hit him back. I went to this place and the nuns didn’t seem to have too many worries”). Gwen has ended up in the convent because she can’t quite sort out her life. All the same, she warns Cecilia that she still has the time to not take her vows and run away while she can.

Cecilia ignores the advice, and before long she learns her nunny duties like examining the stools of the old nuns, positioning washed bedsheets so that they dry in the wind, and beheading a chicken. Cecilia is unable to complete the last task, and doesn’t look too excited about the others. Nonetheless, this is her calling, so she tries to integrate into a society which does not appear to be too eager to welcome her into their ranks.

Before long Cecilia’s health deteriorates, and she she starts puking a lot. The convent doctor looks after her (no dealing with outside hospitals here). Later, she is invited to a discussion with the male priests. It feels more like an interrogation as they demand to know whether she remembers her vows. Sure, she says, poverty, chastity and the other one. And she hasn’t broken any of them?, they ask. Of course not, she says. That’s strange, they say, as it appears that she’s pregnant.

Cecilia’s status in the hospital immediately changes. On the one hand, she’s relieved from all work duties, as her main job is to produce the immaculately conceived saviour within her. At meal times, the other nuns stand up when she enters the room. On the other, another nun is jealous that she is not carrying the future Lord. She attacks Cecilia in the communal baths and attempts to drown her. Later, Other Nun apparently commits suicide by throwing herself off a high tower.

The film has 3 parts, the second and third of which are entitled Second Trimester and Third Trimester. As we approach the end of the third trimester, the plot does get silly (sillier) and a little too dependent on the full mobility and superhuman strength of a woman whose waters have already broken. Yet for all the silliness and excessive gore, Immaculate is stylishly filmed, and for most of the time, we are laughing with it, not at it.

Somewhere inside there, there is a progressive message about men, or the Catholic Church (delete as appropriate) trying to control women’s bodies, so it’s kind of appropriate that one of the last statements we hear is “fuck you”. As Sister Gwen says earlier on, of course God much exist because things can be only as shit as they are if it was decided by a man. Although nothing really seems to make sense, there is a statement about bodily autonomy scrambling to get out.

This is also a very Catholic film. Quite early on, the Mother Superior says “suffering is love”, and there is an underlying message that the pain which Cecilia suffers is somehow good for her soul. Not that Cecilia accepts this message without a fight, but you don’t get the feeling that the tensions which the film sets up would have quite the same impact if it were set in the Church of England. There is a certain intemperance about Catholicism which fits this sort of film.

But is it any good? Apart from the fact that it makes no sense at all, it actually isn’t that bad. It is perfectly possible to go along with its insane logic, including the bit about Convent California holding a nail from your actual Crucifixion. This starts as throwaway instance of the place’s general craziness, and ends up being a legitimate plot point. Once you start thinking about it all, its all hokum, of course, but the film’s strength is that it doesn’t allow you time for such reflection.