[COLUMN] Immaculate Imagines a World Where Everybody's a Bit Weird About Sydney Sweeney's Body | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

NOTE: This piece contains spoilers for Immaculate. If you want to watch, you can bookmark this article and come back. It has one hell of a final shot.

If nothing else, Immaculate makes a convincing argument for Sydney Sweeney as a movie star.

Sweeney has been on the cusp of stardom for a while. She has worked in the industry for a decade-and-a-half, and over the past few years has worked as a credited lead on popular shows like Euphoria and The White Lotus. However, Sweeney has also spoken openly about how difficult it is to make a living, even at that level of fame, famously pointing out that she was not financially secure enough to take even six months off work.

In the past few months, it seems like Sweeney has broken out. She hosted Saturday Night Live. She starred in the surprise breakout hit Anyone But You. She had a prominent supporting role in Madame Web. She is starring in, and producing, a remake of Barbarella. Sweeney is only 26 years old, but she already demonstrates a remarkable awareness of her place in the industry and her relationship to both audiences and powerbrokers.

Most obviously, Sweeney has been candid about her work on Madame Web, a maligned flop. “To me that film was a building block, it’s what allowed me to build a relationship with Sony,” she told GQ. “Without doing Madame Web I wouldn’t have a relationship with the decision-makers over there.” She elaborated, “Everything in my career I do not just for that story, but strategic business decisions. Because I did that, I was able to sell Anyone But You. I was able to get Barbarella.”

That canniness is also at play in Immaculate, Sweeney’s latest project. Immaculate is a horror movie released by indie distributor Neon. It marks a reunion between Sweeney and director Michael Mohan, who previously directed her in the Amazon erotic thriller The Voyeurs and the little-seen Netflix series Everything Sucks! Unlike their earlier collaborations, Sweeney serves as a producer on Immaculate, something of a step up from her executive producer role on Anyone But You.

At its core, Immaculate is a classic “nunsploitation” film. It is the story of a young Detroit nun, Sister Cecilia (Sweeney), who believes that God saved her from drowning after a freak accident as a child. Cecilia is sent to a remote Italian convent that cares for elderly and dying nuns. Naturally, things quickly take a turn for the surreal. Despite her vow of chastity – and the fact that she is a virgin – Cecilia finds herself pregnant.

Under the leadership of Father Sal Tedeschi (Álvaro Morte) and Cardinal Franco Merola (Giorgio Colangeli), the convent celebrates this miraculous nativity. However, Cecilia is uneasy. She comes to feel trapped and exploited. It is very obvious that the members of the convent know more about her pregnancy than they will admit, and that they are more concerned about the fetus than they are about her own safety and security.

In broad terms, Immaculate is a timely horror movie about bodily autonomy. The film was announced in October 2022, just four months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade in a decision that severely restricted abortion rights for women in the United States. Immaculate is a story about a woman being forced to carry a child to term against her wishes by a group of Christian fundamentalists. It is certainly a story that resonates with the anger of the moment over that issue.

Immaculate isn’t a subtle exploration of these themes. Instead, it taps into the primal rage. As early reviews have pointed out, Immaculate owes a lot to Rosemary’s Baby. Sweeney has cited Rosemary’s Baby as one of her favorite horror films and an “inspiration” for Immaculate. That film was adapted from a book that Chuck Palahniuk rightly pointed out was about “a woman’s right to control her own body” that was published a few years before Roe vs. Wade. Immaculate does something similar.

However, it’s worth considering Immaculate as a star vehicle for Sweeney. Even more than Anyone But You, this is Sweeney’s show. She is starring and producing. With all due respect to Morte, there is no co-star here to share the load. Without wishing to offend the director, nobody is thinking of Immaculate as “a Michael Mohan film.” The poster consists entirely of Sweeney’s face. The publicity campaign consists largely of interviews with Sweeney herself.

Unsurprisingly, given how cannily Sweeney positions herself in the media, Immaculate makes a lot of sense as “a Sydney Sweeney film.” This is a movie about a young woman who finds herself constantly objectified and sexualized, and who quickly discovers that her body has become something of a communal resource. It is not her own. Cecilia dresses conservatively and properly, but that is not enough to stop the world around her from projecting their desires and beliefs onto that body.

The online discourse around Sweeney has become so deeply weird that it’s hard to talk about her without sounding creepy. However, Sweeney is a very attractive woman whose body has been heavily commodified through her career. Her breakout role on Euphoria included a lot of nudity. She made the leap to film with The Voyeurs, an erotic thriller. In an era where Hollywood and audiences seem wary of sex on film and television, Sweeney was an unusually and explicitly sexual star.

The media seems unsure how to handle this. Sweeney’s hosting of Saturday Night Live prompted a profoundly odd culture war about her body and what that body had to say about contemporary American culture. This is not a great way to talk about women, but it seems like the culmination of a particularly modern strain of puritanism that seeks to both objectify and dismiss Sweeney at the same time. It’s a reminder of how bad the media is at talking about female celebrities.

As one might expect, given her understanding of the medium, Sweeney is very cognizant of how she is portrayed and discussed. “I see it, and I just can’t allow myself to have a reaction,” she told Variety. “I don’t know how to explain it — I’m still trying to figure it out myself. People feel connected and free to be able to speak about me in whatever way they want, because they believe that I’ve signed my life away. That I’m not on a human level anymore, because I’m an actor.”

Obviously, Immaculate was written and shot long before this controversy, but this is just the latest manifestation of a trend that dates back to the first season of Euphoria, with coverage that included headlines describing Sweeney as “a pair of tits.” There were repeated attempts to hack Sweeney’s private accounts presumably to share intimate pictures. Immaculate is in conversation with that idea. Sweeney acknowledged as much on Saturday Night Live, joking that it was “perfect casting.”

Immaculate features plenty of sequences that explicitly sexualize Sweeney. Taking her vows, she kneels before Cardinal Merola, and looks up at him with her eyes wide open as she gently kisses his ring. As one expects from a “nunsploitation” film, there’s a sense in which Immaculate is – to quote Big Picture co-host Sean Fennessey – “porn without sex scenes.” The young novices spend plenty of time in the baths and showers, often wearing flowing white nightdresses.

In Immaculate, sexuality is interwoven with brutality. It is revealed that Cecelia has been impregnated with a clone of Jesus Christ. As such, Immaculate is a literalization of “the Madonna-whore complex.” Cecelia is both “a bride of Christ” and his mother. That clone is derived from DNA residue on a holy artifact, a nail from the crucifixion. That’s a tool of penetration and violence. Later, after a failed attempt to escape from the convent, Cecelia’s feet are branded with a crucifix.

More than that, as writer Ellie Slee noted, pregnancy is “a real-life body horror.” Horror tends to emphasize the ways that pregnancy distends and contorts the body. In Immaculate, Sweeney’s body is most heavily displayed when Cecilia is most pregnant. Obviously, this is make-up and prosthetics, reinforcing the sense that this is not really Sweeney’s body. It also creates a thematic link between the covenant’s exploitation of Cecilia’s body and the way the audience looks at Sweeney’s body.

There is a sense in which Sweeney is using Immaculate to play with the audience’s complicated (and, frankly, weird) relationship to her. To her credit, this is a classic movie star gambit. Part of what distinguishes a movie star from a simple actor is their screen persona, and many of the best movie stars understand that image of themselves well enough to engage in nuanced conversations about it. It is a way of making projects feel unique and bespoke, tailored to the performer at their center.

Tom Cruise movies, for example, are fairly consistently about the dynamic that exists between the actor and the audience. After her decision to break off her engagement to Kiefer Sutherland complicated the public’s relationship to her, Julia Roberts chose projects that leaned into her prickly relationship with stardom like Notting Hill or which played off the idea of her as somebody who will ruin a wedding like My Best Friend’s Wedding or Runaway Bride.

With this in mind, Sweeney’s decision to tackle a Barbarella remake makes a great deal of sense. It is a remake of the 1968 adaptation of the French comic book series, starring Jane Fonda. Fonda has expressed anxiety about the remake, acknowledging her frustration with her inability to shape the earlier version into “a truly feminist movie.” If Sweeney is playing with the audience’s relationship to her body, it makes sense for her to put a modern spin on “the most iconic sex goddess of the 60’s.”

The movie star has been in decline for at least a decade, with pundits arguing over whether Tom Cruise or Leonardo DiCaprio can claim to be the last true movie star. However, these past few months have suggested that there may be life in the concept yet. Among other things, Dune: Part Two feels like a moment for four (or five) young stars who have been cusping for a while: Timothée Chalamet, Florence Pugh, Austin Butler, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Sweeney’s Euphoria co-star Zendaya.

For years, it seemed like Hollywood had forgotten how to make new stars, which was a problem given that stars help to guide audiences to movies that don’t have a pre-established fanbase. Watching Immaculate, there’s a real sense that Sweeney might just have what it takes to break through. Or, to put it another way: a star is born.