‘Immaculate’: A Seraphic Act of Autonomy
‘Immaculate’: A Seraphic Act of Autonomy
Sydney Sweeney's latest film doubles as an exploration of autonomy for both its protagonist and its star.
Editor Note: Essay contains spoilers
It seems as if Immaculate’s dear ingénue, the American-born Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney), is set up for meekness from the moment she was born. Her namesake is the ever-venerated St. Cecilia, known as the patron saint of music for the way her sweet songs filled the air on her wedding day, praising God in all of its tones. St. Cecilia was a virgin martyr who, on her wedding night, told her new husband that an angel of the Lord was watching, and that if he were to make sexual advances on her, he would risk the Lord’s fury — leave her be, though, and he would be held in reverence by God. The mystic is a prime example of how a woman’s voice is only treasured when sweet-sounding and obedient, and how a woman’s “no” is never enough, but must be supported by a divine power (a masculine divine power, that is) in order to hold any weight.
This legacy carries on to the very first time we see Cecilia onscreen: she is sitting in an Italian customs office, having just arrived in the country, as two customs guards make suave conversation with her, claiming there’s a delay, since she has no return ticket. As they ask her banal questions about how sure she is about taking her vows, one guard whispers to the other in undetectable Italian, “What a waste, look at her, so beautiful.” From the get-go, Cecilia is seen as an object for people to project their fantasies onto.
Cecilia arrives at the convent, where she is met by a cast of disconcertingly cheery faces, including the sour Sister Isabelle (Giulia Heathfield Di Renzi), who pokes and prods at the authenticity of her taking these vows, telling her that the convent is home to nuns who are mentally struggling in their last years, and that it is better to just “play along with their delusions.” She makes a friend in the chain-smoking Sister Mary (Simona Tabasco), who asks her about America and encourages a bit of fun in Cecilia’s tight-laced good nature.
During the Mass to take her vows, the audience is introduced to the spiritual heartbeat of the convent: the church. Unlike a regular Catholic church, and more reminiscent of early Gothic constructions, the altar is lifted to an egregious extent, approximately 10 feet off the ground. It’s in line with earlier Catholic traditions of the closest person to God during the Mass being the priest, who would even perform the sacraments with his back turned to the parishioners. In the case of Immaculate, though, the raised altar further establishes the divide between the interests of those running the convent and those they see as “below”: the nuns who depend on them for everything. As Cecilia takes her vows and kneels in front of the priest (Álvaro Morte), he deviates from tradition, extending his hand for her to kiss his ring. This is a reverence usually reserved for the Pope, and, as Cecilia hesitates and looks to her fellow sisters — who look equally bewildered — her lips on the stone seal the unspoken rule that, even in her fervent devotion, none of the clergymen will ever see her as an equal.
Later that night, Cecilia hears weeping from the tabernacle and, after wandering in, finds a nun prostrated in front of the cross, weeping. She is approached by the Mother Superior (Dora Romano), who shows her a relic of Christ, hidden by the tabernacle, that is said to be the nail that Jesus’s left hand was nailed to the cross with. These relics allow their faith to be tangible, whether true or not, emotionally impacting them so deeply that a believer can’t help but feel overwhelmed by some sort of mystical energy. Cecilia feels overwhelmed not by divinity but by the tenebrous scene in front of her, and passes out. Her dreams lead her to a nightmare of hooded nuns with red cloths covering their faces, stabbing her between the legs. She wakes up, shaking off the nightmare, and, in a few days, realizes she is pregnant.
Watching Cecilia’s pregnancy progress, one feels innately claustrophobic, as the figures around her care more for the baby, and what it means for the convent, than the woman carrying it — something that rings true for many of those who’ve been pregnant. The mother herself becomes an afterthought and the baby is the center of much “kindness” shown to Cecilia — special meals, being excused from menial labour, even a solo bath she takes, which is reminiscent of the milk-bath-and-white-dress iconography that is used to show pregnancy as a divinely magical and connective experience (when the truth is very different and multifaceted). Interrupting this serene scene is Sister Isabelle who, with a swoop of her hand, pulls Cecilia underwater, attempting to drown her until she fights back. A group of nuns take her away as she shouts in Italian, “It shouldn’t be you, they must try again with me!”
In the rushed ultrasound that comes in the aftermath, the clergy’s doctor confirms that the baby is okay, to which Cecilia responds: “But I’m not okay.” She demands her space in the room as an individual — not solely as a mother-to-be, but as a woman. She brings to the forefront the objectification of her, how not a single person has asked if she is okay in the aftermath of almost drowning and, perhaps, throughout the entirety of her being forced into this pregnancy.
Throughout the film, it is hinted that the thing growing inside Cecilia is inhuman, and not in the divine, ecstatic way that those around her want to believe. While everyone around her lights candles and worships the thought of this “second coming” of Christ, Cecilia is seen on her knees in the bathroom, vomiting chunks that she picks through and finds a molar in the midst of. After finding out that her pregnancy is the result of a genetic experiment using tissue samples from the thorn of Christ — a decades-long trial-and-error process by the malevolent deacon (Giuseppe Lo Piccolo) — Cecilia confronts the priest. As she convinces him to level with her about the disastrous results of this unnatural experiment, she rips one of her nails off. It comes off easily and bloodily, in a mess that makes the priest gag.
The women killed by the convent members in this film are stripped of some aspect of their autonomy — a final act of dehumanisation. The day after Sister Isabelle's attempted drowning of Cecilia, she falls from a window, which is framed as a suicide. As Cecilia approaches, however, she sees her face completely caked in blood and disfigured, her legs broken at the knees, her body and face desecrated long before her body hit the cobblestones. Sister Mary, the woman who has arguably the most rabble-rousing personality in the film, is taken by the deacon and another clergy member after speaking out publicly against the convent and trying to rally the nuns to fight against the system. Later that night, she is seen by Cecilia, who hears screams and wanders out to the shed, where she watches from a keyhole as Sister Mary’s bottom lip is ripped off of her face — a masterful scene in which we suddenly switch perspectives to be inside the room looking out. Cecilia’s wide cerulean eyes leak tears but no sobs, frozen in the horror of her friend being silenced even in her death.
To vanquish the evils that surround her, Cecilia chooses to kill each of the perpetrators with their own holy devices. As the doctor exits the room during a third-trimester ultrasound, leaving the leering and fanatic Mother Superior to fawn over the Christ-child and his mother’s “occhi di girasole” (sunflower eyes), Cecilia grabs a silver cross from the table by the bedside and smashes it against the back of Mother Superior’s head. Another hit, and Mother Superior is on the floor. Cecilia slowly rises, looking down, her face angry and exhausted, and beats the nun’s head in, rendering her disfigured, caked in blood, soul halfway to the afterlife by the time she walks out of the room. This first killing is animalistic — deeply personal, charged with rage, and, compared to the others, the goriest, as if Cecilia is saying, “How dare you do this to me — you, a fellow woman, put me through the thing we, deep down, all fear: our bodies being taken away from us,” while slinging the ultimate symbol of her worship to kill her.
Cecilia’s water breaks as she walks out of the room, and, to her and the audience’s horror, we realise she will be continuing the final act as the unknown Christ-child worms its way out of her. She uses a rosary to kill the priest, who is on a balcony, choking him to death with the same tool she held in her hands during her confessions with him. She is taking back the shame, the guilt, the humiliation that confessions so often illicit, rejecting a system that would subjugate her regardless of her supposed moral standing. The beads pierce his skin and slit his throat as he chokes, and the hand that held the red ring Cecilia was made to kiss now lies limp beside him.
After failing to burn the deacon by setting fire to the laboratory, Cecilia is chased into the catacombs, where, after encountering the dead body of Sister Mary (mouth deformed almost beyond recognition), she finds a tunnel escape and shimmies her way through, only for her ankles to be grabbed by the deacon, who pulls her onto the floor. As he holds her down, he begins to pray the “Ave Maria” — remarkable in that, for a film so centered around the question of divine femininity, this is one of the few times the prayer is actually said. He spits out these holy words, cutting at her belly, trying to enact a forced c-section (another harrowing echo of the thousands of women who are forced to have births that will harm them more in the end). Cecilia grabs the thorn of Christ — this representation of the ultimate form of divinity, and the symbol of all of the deacon’s work — and slits his throat with it. In each of her killings, Cecilia reclaims the tools of a religious community that were used to subjugate and further brutalize her existence.
Cecilia makes it out of the cave, and the camera stays on just her face, caked in blood, exhaustion pouring out of every crease. Cecilia screams, and for a moment, after everything that’s happened, I forget that she’s in active labor. In my mind, her screams take on colors of their own: her anguish at the life she had thought would help calm her spirit actually destroying it, the anger at the people who used her body like a vessel and a sacrament, the guilt of having killed the clergy members, and the relief of being free of the convent, now and forever.
It’s only in the silence, the horror creeping into her eyes, the way her mouth falls slowly agape, that it hits me: she’s just given birth. What Cecilia does next turns the concept of “maternal instinct” completely on its head, giving way to a much stronger feeling — that of knowing how to protect yourself. She operates on the true, instinctual wisdom that what’s been done to her is wrong — having to birth a baby she did not want is wrong, having her body be the carrier of this not-exactly-human creature whose sole purpose is to give glory and power to men who don’t deserve it is wrong. She grabs the umbilical cord, wraps it around her canines, and bites until the cord is cut. Sweeney is savage, animalistic, unflinchingly grotesque, and deeply spectacular in every dimension of this scene. Her eyes dance the line between duty and madness as she wanders over to a rock, decidedly lifts it up, carries it over to the creature (who the audience sees as a blurry pile of bloodied mess in the background), raises it above her head, and screams as she throws it down, killing the creature and finally freeing herself from the clutches of the unwanted intruder in her body — and finding that now, she will belong to herself, only and forever.
Textually and metatextually, Immaculate is an act of reclaiming autonomy. Cecilia’s story of reclaiming her body and dispatching with those who don’t allow her to belong to herself is not far off from her off-screen counterpart: Sydney Sweeney, arguably one of the most brilliant yet most objectified actors working today. The making of Immaculate was entirely backed by Sweeney: after auditioning for the film when she was 16, only for the movie to fall through, she tracked down the script, bought the rights, brought on the incredibly emotionally intelligent Michael Mohan to direct, and produced the film herself. Her tour-de-force performance as the brave Cecilia shows a gripping sincerity and groundedness within supernatural circumstances that truly makes the emotional core of this film soar — you don’t just feel bad for Cecilia, you feel as if you are fighting alongside her. As her shining career progresses, Sweeney seems to be slowly taking herself back from the clutches of the misogynistic public that labelled her as the blonde girl with good tits — a public that voraciously and mercilessly continues to consume her body as an object of sex and intrigue — and reclaims her humanity, gripping, real, and moving as it is in every dimension.
With girlhood being the topic du jour, I couldn’t help but notice the dimensions of femininity present within this film, divine by book and divine by feeling. Arguably the most visually stunning scene in the film is the Mass service that takes place immediately after Cecilia finds out she is pregnant: she wears pin-curls, an overflowing heaven-blue veil, and a golden-embroidered blue dress, reminiscent of the image of Marian virginity as described in Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s painting “The Immaculate Conception,” wherein Mary, in an outfit almost identical to Cecilia’s, stands atop the world itself surrounded by angels. In the Catholic tradition, this Mass is supposed to show Cecilia, the new virgin mother, as the object of a venerated act of worship (what many in the religious traditions would describe as the utmost expression of divine femininity). But in the red that we see encircling Cecilia’s eyes in a close-up of her face — tears leaking from her face as she stands on an impossibly high altar platform and looks down, acutely aware of the distance that power structures of religion have from the actual worshippers — one can sense the charade from miles away.
Where I find Immaculate's most genuine expression of girlhood is in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it scene included in the montage of Cecilia learning to be a sister. The newly minted nuns are learning how to handle the washing from clotheslines and, as Cecilia and Sister Mary finally get the hang of it, the two girls pretend the longer sheets are large doors and fling them open, striking grand poses and doubling over laughing, hidden by the lines of laundry. I find God less in complicated traditions and more in the laughter shared between friends, in the innocence of play and the joys of smelling a fresh load of laundry. I find God less in strict adherence, and more in a world where women like Cecilia are no longer subjugated to power systems that force their bodies into mangled states of horror, but allowed to be as she was in that moment — peaceful, clear of mind, and belonging only to herself.