I finally finished Immaculate (2024) on a blu-ray borrowed from the
library. According to IMDb uncited trivia, she had auditioned for the
movie at age 17, 10 years before the movie finally went into production,
when the heroine was written as a teenage girl. We're still supposed to
believe that the actress from The Voyeurs (2021) and the tv series
Euphoria is a virgin.

Maybe if you say it in Joel Grey's voice...

A novice believes her life was saved miraculously, so she's the closest
to immaculate (preserved from Original Sin by God's grace) they can get.
Father Sal writes to her, asking her to join a convent in Italy to, uh,
care for elderly nuns. Yeah, that's what they are doing. Despite
believing she's immaculate, they check that she's a virgin when she
arrives.

It's a weird and terrifying place. Nuns are not permitted to leave. If
they escape, they are dragged back and murdered. The elderly nuns all
have crosses burned into the soles of their feet. Some of the younger
nuns have figured out terrible things are happening, complain, and get
murdered for it.

No nudity but there's a shot of Sydney baring her stomach, I guess to
show the audience she's not pregnant.

I guess she's drugged one night. One of the nuns enters her room, does something to her, and she'll learn she's gotten pregnant. There's a
meeting with the bishop who decrees it miraculous.

The pregnancy may not be going well and they won't take her to a
hospital as they keep telling her it's "safer". Uh ok. She fakes loosing
the baby and hemorrhaging, but the nun who turkey basted her figured out
it was a dead animal. They don't take her to hospital but return her and
brand her feet.

The priest reveals that he used to be a geneticist. The holy relic at
the convent, a nail from Jesus's crucifiction that he believes has
Jesus's flesh, so he's been doing genetic experiments and somehow
creating clones and putting them into the wombs of unsuspecting novices, although the one that tried to murder her thought she'd carry the clone.

Cloning doesn't require much in the way of facilities these days. Hey!
thus is a thing. After all, in the Woody Allen movie Sleeper, all they
had was a bit of nose.

In the big finale, Sydney murders all the conspirators, destroys the lab
and relic, gets a partial C section (which doesn't cause a rupture),
gives birth in the usual way, and kills the abomination.

I didn't get much of an impression of gothic horror and there's more
religious ritual in waiving a chicken.

Sydney wanted the movie made, so she bought the script and got the money
raised to get it produced. Mostly Italian cast but the priest is
Spanish.

I haven't seen The FIrst Omen, which got released around the same time,
but it's supposed to have a similar plot.

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