Immaculate

Hot Cross Nuns

Immaculate
Directed by Michael Mohan
Italy/USA
2024 Black Bear
UK Cinema Print

Warning: Some slight spoilers as this is a celebration of the film as much as it is a review.

Wow... just absolutely wow. Immaculate is an amazing film which, I suspect will get enthusiastic reviews from horror fans of a certain age and bad reviews from anyone else. I absolutely loved it and hats off to Sydney Sweeney, not just for her continually impressive acting talent but for her to get this thing produced and finally accepted after it stalled some years ago.

Okay, so this one is a blisteringly wild and deeply satisfying ride of a motion picture. The basic plot is, after dying in a Damien Omen 2 inspired, accidental swim under some ice when she was a kid, Sister Cecilia, played by Sydney Sweeney, is revived after almost ten minutes and tries to find out what the heck God has saved her life for. She joins a monastery in the US but is then rescued... when that goes under due to a lack of attendance... by a convent in Italy. We already know, though, that things are really bad there from the pre-credits scene, when four sinister nuns break the leg of another nun and then bury her alive because she was trying to escape.

Then, as Cecilia is getting used to the spooky place, she undergoes a trauma, which she and the audience perceive as a nightmare/dream sequence, only to awaken pregnant. Since she is still a virgin, carrying a seemingly immaculate conception, the various nuns worship her for the miracle she is hosting but, as you may guess by now... demonic things are afoot.

That’s the basic intro and I have to say, this one impressed me so much. It totally goes where most modern horror films don’t go these days. It doesn’t quite make the nunsploitation genre... I think topless, lesbian nuns and whips would be needed to sell that one... but it has torture, violence, gore (and wet, flimsy, see through habits which leave absolutely nothing to the imagination) and it absolutely feels like a 1970s/early 1980s Italian exploitation/horror film. I mean it when I say that this tongue slicing, foot branding, face pummelling, womb cutting, umbilical cord chewing movie goes the whole hog and, if it had been released on video tape in this country in the 1980s, it would have easily made the Video Nasty list, for sure. In fact, I’m surprised that the censors let this one in the country right now, to be honest.

And not only that, the movie really embraces that vibe right from the start. I mean, Will Bates’ cimbalom infused score with chorus and atonal colourings is absolutely brilliant (please, somebody release a CD of this). This included an astonishing moment where the music actually acts as a surrogate for the character. When somebody is getting a cross branded onto the sole of her foot, the sound has dropped out without detection and Bates’ score is already standing in, giving voice to her scream with high pitched notes! And, boy, was I surprised when a whole montage sequence of Cecilia settling into the convent needle drops Bruno Nicolai’s exquisite main theme from the giallo The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (one of my favourite pieces by this composer). It’s admittedly striking to the point of distraction but, heck, it’s toe tapping as hell and I was surprised to see that none of the other audience members were getting down the beat, as it were.

And Sydney Sweeney totally leans into the atmosphere of the film completely, giving a really brave performance that is an absolute powerhouse (more so even than her brilliant turn in Reality, reviewed here). There’s something primal about the way she pulls this one off and the last five to ten minutes of the film are totally owned by her. Talk about pulling out the stops.

The ending was a satisfying moment, too. This doesn’t do the Hollywood thing where we cut to an epilogue releasing the tension of all that’s come before and giving a nudge towards closure. No, this ending reminded me specifically of a late 1960s/early 1970s Hammer horror movie like Quatermass And The Pit (reviewed here). At the time, those films would usually end with whatever surviving protagonist(s) just wallowing silently in the aftermath of the sheer grimness of what they’ve just survived, their minds adjusting slowly to what they’ve fought through. This one does exactly that and... yeah... the film is intense and grim but, if you are not too distracted by the harsh suspense of certain scenes, there’s also a thread of somewhat blasphemous humour shot through it as well.

And, honestly, I have nothing but good things to say about Immaculate and it looks truly beautiful (just as an Italian horror film from that period would). I hope that a boutique Blu Ray label such as Severin or Vinegar Syndrome or Arrow pick this one up for release because it certainly wouldn’t look out of place with certain parts of their catalogues and I know they could do some amazing extras with the correct kind of context. Talking of which, I absolutely cannot wait to get this one on Blu Ray so I can watch it again. Unfortunately, limited time and a slew of ‘to be seen’ cinema releases for the next month or so means I won’t be able to experience this one at the cinema again but, back in the day, I would have been going back to this one a couple of times, I can tell you. So there you go, if you are into 70s/80s Italian horror movies then... run, don’t walk, to your nearest cinema and check this one out. Such a treat.

Madame Web

Uncle Ben’s
Responsibility

Madame Web
Directed by S.J. Clarkson
USA/Canada
2024 Sony/Columbia
UK Cinema Print

Warning: Some spoilers, if you care enough.

Hmm... okay, Madame Web is the first of three Sony films released this year as part of their extended Spider-Man universe. You would think that now they have absconded again with the rights to the character, that they would, at least, feature Spider-Man in these three stories but... oh no. Or rather, actually, yes kinda in this one but... okay I’ll get to that in a minute. The film stars Dakota Johnson as the titular character (although she’s never once referred to as that in the film... which makes total sense when you see the movie) and, due to shenanigans involving her birth and special powers she doesn’t realise she had (like Diana in the first Wonder Woman movie), she is trying to protect three ‘teenage’ girls from the movie’s main villain, who sees future versions of them killing him at some unspecified point. When I say teenage... Isabela Merced, Celeste O'Connor and Sydney Sweeney are all in their twenties, the latter only a few ears away from 30 but, still, it’s Hollywoodland and they’re all supposed to be between about 16-18, it seems to me.

Anyhow... the movie itself has got some of the worst reviews (bearing in mind it wasn’t even screened for critics) I’ve heard for a Marvel related movie but, I have to say, though it’s inferior to almost any of the MCU branded Marvel films, it’s actually not the disaster that people are reporting it to be. Saying that though, I can totally see why it has got that reaction because the structure of the movie promises way more than it gives in terms of what the content of the film is actually going to be... the people making this weren’t that smart not to realise what they did, I think.

So, yeah, Johnson’s character is someone who gets brief glimpses of the very near future, like a very strong deja vu, so she can change things just before they are supposed to happen. So the director will sometimes use a big sound (like a champagne cork being pulled) or sometimes, quite cleverly, a distinctive camera movement, to usher in a replay of the events as they are about to repeat. And although it’s an obvious concoction the first time she does it, it is done pretty well throughout and the visual and audio shorthand built on those key aspects does the job very well.

You also have a couple of good performances, especially Sydney Sweeney (who was so brilliant in last year’s Reality, reviewed here), who really does well with facial expressions and so on to make her ‘bizarrely teen’ teenager come to life in quite sophisticated ways. However, although there are some good and likeable performances here, the structure of the film undermines a lot of the work being done.

Here’s the thing, all the stuff in the trailers where the three girls are in costume and using their spider powers are... just seen as brief, visions of the future in the heads of both the title character and the villain. So there are maybe three brief moments, maybe totalling less than a minute and a half, where you see the girls in costume, at some undetermined future date. In fact, whatever superpowers the three ‘teens’ do acquire... they don’t get them in this movie. It’s for some ‘future’ movie which, I’m guessing, might not even get made... and with Dakota Johnson jokingly downplaying the movie when she’s supposed to be promoting it, I’m guessing the four leads would have to be locked into contracts before they return to those characters. Which may well be the case actually but, I’m guessing this movie won’t be doing the numbers enough to make the next film worth making. This is obviously, like the up and coming Venom 3 and Kraven The Hunter movies, supposed to be leading to the Sinister Six, which started happening (again, it’s Sony’s second lead in after the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man movies) in Morbius (reviewed here)... when Morbius and Michael Keaton’s Vulture character met at the post-credits on that film. But, if the other two perform badly (I suspect Venom will do well but I can’t see the new Kraven doing much better than Morbius), then that may still not happen.

To that end though, there are some really bizarre references to the Spider-Man universe in this film... asides from the Spider powered natives in the Amazon plus the main villain all dressing pretty similarly to Spider-Man. The thing is, though, Sony are making references and shouting them out while simultaneously keeping a lid on things a little with their linking materials. If you are a Spider-Man fan and are not distracted by the visuals, you’ll ‘get’ who a couple of the characters are supposed to be... and one of them is teased but not named, even though fans will know exactly who he is.

The main action of the movie takes place in 2003 and I couldn’t figure out why they did this. Until Dakota Johnson’s character Cassie, a paramedic, calls her partner by name. He’s... drum roll... Ben Parker. Yeah, that’s right... future Uncle Ben. And the ‘with great power comes great responsibility’ line, which has been a core Spider-Man ingredient since his first comic book appearance in 1962, is dangled about like crazy in slightly reworded terms. And, that’s not all... Ben’s sister is pregnant and the girls are trying to protect her so she can give birth at the end of the movie. Casual viewers won’t twig it because he’s not named (despite an earlier ‘guess the name of the baby’ scene calling attention to it in the most obvious manner) but by the end of the film she gives birth to Peter Parker... aka Spider-Man. I guess the actor who was/is supposed to be playing that role in ‘films to come’ for Sony is not yet decided, is my guess. Or... you know... not yet given a big enough pay hike to return to that role.

But the biggest problem with the film, as I eluded to earlier, is the fact that it keeps telegraphing the gals suiting up and being super heroes... and so this is what the audience is expecting to happen at some point in the movie. So many people may not be aware that the climactic action scene is exactly that until it's over, I’m guessing, because they are waiting for the superhero element to come into play. It never does and that’s why I suspect we’ve had the huge negative reviews on this. It’s just an overly complicated set up for a film to come (with a poor ending, it has to be said). But, like I said, it’s not a terrible movie... just an unsatisfying one so, yeah, I can totally understand why it’s getting the word-of-mouth that it has. Madame Web is not a crowd pleaser but it’s also not as bad as, say, Morbius was so... there’s that. I had an okay time with it... I’d probably watch it again. Just not anytime soon. Maybe worth watching to see how it locks into the next few Sony Spider-movies perhaps but, there’s absolutely no post-credits scene on this one so, something tells me that rug may have already been pulled.

Reality

Bites

Reality
USA 2023
Directed by Tina Sutter
Vertigo Films

Warning: I guess if you don’t know the real life events behind this one, as I certainly didn’t, then technically this review does have spoilers.

“The FBI documented the following events with an audio recorder.
The dialogue in this movie is taken entirely from the transcript of that recording.”
From Reality

It’s been said that drama is no better manifested than in real life. I’m not 100% sure about that myself. I think drama is very much a fashioned/crafted art form trying to capture the compelling tension of everyday life, even if the events being written and performed are not based on a true incident. Reality, is based on a true incident... and it’s also based on a play ‘written’ by this film’s director (who also co-wrote the script). I put written in inverted commas because, the way a play or a film is staged, performed and, in the case of a movie, shot and edited (amongst other things) is the art which informs the drama, so to speak.

So the original play was called Is This A Room? And it’s based on an FBI audio transcript, lasting just under an hour and a half, on the real life events of the questioning in her home and, subsequent arrest, of ex-military translator and former intelligence specialist Reality Winner in 2017. And when I say based on, I mean the dialogue script and running time of the film is verbatim from those recordings. Although they are not the actual recordings heard themselves... the actors in this one just speak the lines and, in the case of actress Sydney Sweeney who plays Reality, taking the performance to the nth degree in that she would talk with the real Ms. Winner on zoom calls and study her mannerisms and so on as she was talking to her. She looks a little bit like her too... something which becomes apparent when real life artefacts are used on some of the images thrown up on the screen for illustrative purposes or to push a point.

Okay, so we have Sweeney as Winner, Josh Hamilton as Agent Garrick, Marchánt Davis as Agent Taylor and Benny Elledge as Unknown Male. Plus a dog and a cat, representing Reality’s pets, who hold things up slightly when they need to be tied up and put into controlled situations before a room in the house is used for Reality’s initial interrogation, which is what this film is all about. And all of the actors in this movie are absolutely great. And, let’s face it, if drama does stem from reality then the drama inherent in the dialogue provided by the FBI recording in Reality, is certainly one step closer to drama than, well, normal reality... you know, with a lower case r.

But, of course, it’s drama as opposed to ‘just reality’ so, there are all manner of visual and audio contrivances (such as a musical underscore) to enhance that drama. Just as there are also elements to constantly remind the audience that they are watching a true series of events unfold in real time, more or less as they happened.

Of that latter technique we have the time settings given precisely. For example, after an opening bit of footage showing Reality working at her desk in an office which constantly has Fox News on the TV screens, something used by her later to try and explain her motivations, we jump into the main meat of the film which takes place, as the screen tells us... 25 days later. June 3, 2017 - Augusta, Georgia. Then, throughout the movie, at random moments, we jump cut to an on screen graphic depicting the sound waves of the recording as the conversation (or not) is being spoken. In addition to reminding the audience that they are essentially listening to a version of a direct transcript, these are accompanied by a time stamp somewhere on the screen. Although, since it’s such a useful device, the time stamp is not solely used in the scenes depicting the graphics. So we can see, for instance, that it’s not until 4.07pm, 37 minutes into the recording, until she is accompanied from the front yard area into her home to begin the actual interrogation.

And, though the film is relatively impartial to the rights and wrongs of the situation... we know it’s almost an hour into the film before she admits to her crime. I’ll come back to that in a minute.

Another, truly wonderful moment of artistry in the mechanics of how the script of the transcript is presented lies in the parts of the recording which the general public are not allowed to know about. At one point, we are shown a text of the conversation we are listening to and part of the recording has been redacted... there’s then a weird, scribbly high pitched computer gibberish sound made when the cursor travels over that part. And then, once the director has put that audio signifier into the audience’s mind that anything featuring that sound effect is a redacted part of the audio as it stands, she then pushes that angle visually. So as we are watching the conversation unfold between the actors, whenever somebody says something which has a redacted portion in it, the sound cue returns and they are deleted visually from the screen for the few seconds that part of the dialogue is being said. There’s a fantastic moment where the sound effect is going off and Sydney Sweeney walks towards the camera, left of screen and, as the redaction ends, we find she is face to face with another character in the room. So, yeah, for a directorial debut in the motion picture industry, I have to hand it to Tina Sutter for fully grasping how to play around with the boundaries of the cinematic language. This hopefully won’t be her last movie.

The only other thing I will say about the content of the film/play... which has Reality Winner’s full endorsement (although, I believe she feels to actually watch it herself and relive the encounter may be too traumatic), is that I think it’s somewhat open to interpretation as to whether you come out on her side or not. Yes, she was definitely found guilty of passing on a printout of a classified document to a newspaper which proved the election results were hacked and rigged... and got a ‘five years and change’ prison sentence for it. At least that’s my understanding of it... as regular readers may remember, politics just isn’t my thing. The flip side as hinted at in the movie’s final moments seems to be in defence of the subject of the film, perhaps asking the question... was that not doing more of a public service to the American people by letting that truth out there than if it hadn’t got out?

I don’t have an answer to that, at least not an official one but, yeah, it’s a hard call. I kinda wish there were no secrets held by any government agency anywhere (I want to know more about the space aliens) but there’s also probably a very compelling case to be made that many things classified at this level of secrecy is a necessity, I would imagine.

At the end of the day, all I know for sure is two things. One is that I really love that a movie has to have a credit in the final roll that holds the title ‘video glitches’. Secondly, that Reality is an absolutely riveting piece of drama and I would recommend it to most people. Whether justice is served in terms of being a drama closer to reality and whether justice was served to Reality, is something you’ll have to decide for yourself, I think.