Movie Review: Things get scary for Sydney Sweeney in a creepy Italian convent in ‘Immaculate’

It’s not your imagination: Sydney Sweeney is everywhere. In the past four months, she’s been in a romantic comedy that turned into a sleeper hit, a superhero movie that didn’t and, as of this weekend, a bloody horror. Results have varied, quality-wise, but for someone the culture seems to want to (unfairly) pigeonhole as a specific type, she is really blowing through movie genres in record time.

She also happened to produce the horror, “Immaculate,” in which she plays a young American nun, Cecilia, who’s decided to join an Italian convent. Her character found God after a near-death experience at a young age and, after her parish closes, she gets a lifeline to go abroad and help tend to older, dying nuns. The prettiness of the new surroundings is just a front, of course, and she starts to discover some sinister happenings within the ancient walls.

“Immaculate” is a project that Sweeney originally auditioned for a decade ago, when she was 16. If anything, it is a great showcase for Sweeney’s range (she gets to go from somewhat meek to primal scream) and is full of interesting visuals, beautiful costumes and accomplished makeup work showing all manner of bloody, mangled faces and limbs. But it’s also a movie that does not seem as sure of itself or the point it's trying to make.

It’s not hard to make a remote Italian convent creepy, or say something provocative and interesting about organized religion — quite a few horrors have succeeded here in the past. But “Immaculate” is not even confident enough to let us experience this place exclusively through Cecilia. No, it opens with a nightmarish prologue to give us a tease of what’s in store for our innocent heroine, like it’s a straight-to-streaming film that doesn’t want you to click onto something else. Being a theatrical release, however, you have to imagine that ticket buyers are going to give the movie the benefit of the doubt and not flee 15 minutes into an 89-minute run.