Summary
- Sydney Sweeney’s production company played a role in the making of the psychological horror film Immaculate after the actress read the script as a teenager.
- The movie’s decade-long journey involved changes to the script and character dynamics to create a thought-provoking plot.
- Director Michael Mohan aimed to shock audiences with a grotesque finale, deviating from the original conservative ending.
Sydney Sweeney’s new psychological horror movie, Immaculate, has horror fans talking. A combination of Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, the film tackles religious themes as it tells the story of Cecilia, a devout American nun who joins an Italian monastery, and follows her journey as sinister secrets unfold.
Sweeney has emerged as a versatile actress, but some people might be surprised to learn that she also has a passion for producing. Sweeney’s Fifty Fifty Films, a production company she launched in 2020, is one of the film’s producers along with Black Bear Productions. Many fans know her from the hit TV drama Euphoria and, most recently, from the romantic comedy Anyone But You, a film she also produced. It seems like nothing can stop the powerhouse that is Sydney Sweeney, but that hasn’t always been the case as this movie almost didn’t make it to the silver screen.
Immaculate
3.5/5
- Release Date
- March 22, 2024
- Director
- michael mohan
- Cast
- Sydney Sweeney , Simona Tabasco , Álvaro Morte , Benedetta Porcaroli , Dora Romano
Sydney Sweeney’s First Encounter with Cecilia
Sweeney has been open about the efforts made to bring this film to audiences around the world, a film that’s been ten years in the making. She revealed to Jimmy Fallon that she originally auditioned for the role of Cecilia when she was 16 years old. Time passed, and the film never left the development stage, every production’s worst nightmare. After hearing from her agents that the film was discarded, she moved on to other projects, but the script and Cecilia were always in the back of Sweeney’s mind.
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Sweeney shared with MovieWeb that she loved Cecilia’s complexity and the wild journey she embarks on. It was exciting for her to portray a character that audiences could easily compare at the beginning of the film and the development she experiences to become the character they’re left with. This role influenced her decision to embark on a wild journey of her own as a producer. She purchased the rights to the screenplay and reached out to Andrew Lobel (Delirium and the Dollman, Dead or Alive), the original screenwriter, to express her interest in seeing this through.
In an interview for Inverse, she explained the challenges she went through to get a copy of the first draft.
It was a bit tricky because the script was locked up for a while and I had to wait to be able to pull out the clean original draft. Once I was able to do that, then it became more of putting the right puzzle pieces together.
Once the rewriting began and financing for the film was acquired, Sweeney reached out to long-time collaborator Michael Mohan (The Voyeurs, Everything Sucks) to direct the movie. After having worked together on Amazon Prime Video’s thriller The Voyeurs and Netflix’s Everything Sucks, Sweeney and Mohan formed a bond over the creation process and trust each other’s ideas.
Mike and I can just look at each other, and we know what we’re thinking. We know what needs to be fixed. We know what’s working without even having to say a word.
Immaculate Was a Decade in the Making
A decade in the making, Sweeney, Lobel, and Mohan’s efforts came to fruition and gave horror fans the film that’s in theaters now. Mohan and Lobel got to work on making alterations and changed the location from an Irish boarding school to an Italian monastery, Cecilia’s age, and the supporting characters. The final draft of the script consists of the following characters: Mother Superior (Dora Romano), Father Tedeschi (Álvaro Morte), Sister Gwen (Benedetta Porcaroli), Sister Mary (Simona Tabasco), and many more.
They incorporated more of Mohan’s Catholic upbringing into the film and made Sweeney’s character a nun to create more possibilities for the plot and capture the attention of the audience, because if there’s anything that can spark a debate, it’s religion. These changes reflect the challenges of the world today and the horror films that impact audiences. One particular topic that stands out from the film is bodily autonomy, an issue that unfortunately hasn’t been resolved today.
In an interview for Variety, Sweeney discussed the cultural significance of the themes in the film and how much they reflect the real world now as much as they did ten years ago.
I called the writer, Andrew Lobel, and got the clean, original draft, then reworked it to fit who I am today, keeping a lot of the same themes and storylines.
What’s so cool is that there are so many different themes and points of conversation for people to draw their own conclusions or assumptions.
Immaculate Review: One Hell of a Blood-Soaked Sister Act
Sydney Sweeney is mesmerizing in this slow-burning horror film that requires patience. But the payoff is big.
Pandemonium ensues in the third act when Cecilia goes into labor, and this grotesque finale is courtesy of Mohan. When Mohan signed on to direct the film, he wanted the movie to have an ending that would shock audiences, and to do that, he had to change Lobel’s original ending. He revealed his dissatisfaction with the originally conservative ending to Inverse and that it consisted of Cecilia contently watching her child play in a picturesque setting.
He intended to create a horror film that shocked audiences to their core and not make it into a political statement. However, art imitates life; like all great movies, this one will start a conversation. Mohan told IndieWire that he proudly takes credit for this ending.
When I first read the script, it did not have this ending, and when I closed the script, I had the vision for what this needed to be. It is my proudest directorial moment because it is exactly how I pictured it. The way the camera moves, the reveal of whatever [the baby] might be, sort of out of focus in the background as she picks up the rock, it is beat for beat everything I dreamed of.
Though it took a bit, with some perseverance and help from collaborators, Sweeney finally brought Immaculate to our screens. Check out the trailer below:
