Long regarded as an excellent shouter, the actress reaches her full-volume potential as a final girl in the religious horror flick Immaculate, says Yasmin Omar.
This article contains ‘Immaculate’ spoilers.
It was only a matter of time before Sydney Sweeney became a scream queen. Her work on the stylised high-school drama Euphoria (2019–), in particular, established her as an exemplary shouter. She plays the strung-out Cassie – chasing after Jacob Elordi’s abusive jock – who spends much of season two teetering on the knife edge of a nervous breakdown and, after finally toppling into the abyss, emerges with the blazing fury of a woman scorned. Euphoria’s most celebrated (and memed) moments invariably involve Sweeney shrieking with window-shattering intensity; ‘I’ve never, ever been happier!’, of course, but also ‘I am crazier!’. Immaculate, her first foray into horror as an actor-producer, capitalises on her God-given gift for visceral, high-decibel screeching.
The film largely does this by withholding her screaming from us, thereby raising the anticipation for it. After the closure of her Detroit parish, Sister Cecilia (Sweeney) relocates to an isolated convent in rural Italy on the advice of Father Tedeschi (Álvaro Morte). Once she has taken her vows, Cecilia starts cottoning onto the fact that all is not as it seems in the abbey: there are suicidal crows, homunculi in jars, nuns who lop off chunks of her hair in the night. These disturbing occurrences throw Sweeney’s character into a state of pupil-dilating, hitched-breathing fear though not, crucially, one she vocalises. Not yet, anyway.
We get our first whisper of a scream when Cecilia is tugged backwards out of a confessional by a cabal of shadowy nuns whose greedy hands claw at her nostrils, her cheeks, her lips. Sweeney struggles and moans but, because their fingers are probing her mouth, cannot let out a full-bellied yell. That, and her jolting awake – revealing the scene to be a nightmare – cuts the horror short. No matter, we press on… Another scream tease arrives when Cecilia immaculately conceives a child, thought to be the second coming of Christ, which drives Sister Isabelle (Giulia Heathfield Di Renzi) to a jealous, murderous rage. While Cecilia is bathing, Isabelle creeps up behind her and plunges her head underwater to drown her. We see Sweeney’s thrashing arms, saucer-big eyes and the flurry of little bubbles streaming from her open, petrified mouth. But we can’t hear her cries; they are muffled by the water. Immaculate, once again, keeps us in suspense.
Immaculate (2024)
There is something off about the eventual first screaming scene. Cecilia, covered in blood from the waist down, rolls her eyes to the back of her head, and her head back against her pillow, wailing for the Father to take her to hospital. Her reaction to her own, and her baby’s, potential demise is loud – Sweeney’s breathless and groaning and sobbing – but you can tell that she’s not giving it her all. She’s holding back, a throttle this is not. Another rug-pull: Cecilia has been acting. She is not miscarrying, she smeared herself in animal blood in an attempt to escape the increasingly creepy institution she’s trapped in. The actress’ performance is accumulative, conveying just a little more with every passing sequence, doling out small chunks of emotion like rations. The film, too, is slowly building, deliberately frustrating our desire for it to unleash Sweeney. When Father Tedeschi discovers the fake-blood ruse, he sprints after the runaway Cecilia, who is visibly screaming, and yet the hypersonic thrum of the sound design smothers her audio.
Immaculate (2024)
The final act of Immaculate must, and does, deliver on its unspoken promise of climactic caterwauling. The Father, desperate to take possession of Cecilia’s child, produces a scalpel from his robes and starts cutting the baby out of her (without any anaesthetic, I might add). This is it. Sweeney lets rip. The blinding, poker-hot pain shudders through her whole body – the curled toes, the resisting limbs – and surges out of her mouth in an extended, high-pitched howl, punctuated by little yelps and an excruciating litany of ‘no, no, nos’. You think that’s it, you pray that’s it – how much further could Sweeney possibly go?! – and yet an absolute death rattle of a scream awaits. Incapacitating the Father, Cecilia heaves herself up to her feet and looks straight down the camera, which holds her in a close-up, to deliver the baby. Sydney Sweeney screams with her face scrunched in agony and blood stringing her teeth; Sydney Sweeney screams with a guttural, tonsil-revealing force; Sydney Sweeney screams as if she’s expelling a satanic force through her vocal cords. It’s as miraculous as the child in her character’s untouched womb – and well worth the wait.
The actress appears willing to try her hand at anything. In the last three months alone, she has starred in a rom-com (Anyone But You), a superhero film (Madame Web) and, now, a horror movie. Based on the strength of her performance in Immaculate, the genre is crying out for more of Sydney Sweeney, and her primal scream.
WATCH IMMACULATE IN CINEMAS
