Sydney Sweeney's Horror Movie Immaculate Continues An Exciting Actor-Director Relationship
"Euphoria" and "The White Lotus" star Sydney Sweeney has been having a pretty stellar moment. While the actor has been performing since childhood, her star has been shooting across the sky in the last few years. Just last year, she starred in the thrilling drama "Reality" for HBO and the box office smash hit "Anyone But You," and is kicking off her 2024 by entering Sony's Spider-Man Universe with "Madame Web." But becoming Spider-Woman isn't the only exciting venture on Sweeney's horizon. She's also reteaming with director Michael Mohan once again, this time for the horror film "Immaculate."
With a script by Andrew Lobel, "Immaculate" is a psychological horror film wherein Sweeney plays Cecilia, a nun who is given the opportunity to join an illustrious convent in Italy. Her new home seems absolutely perfect until strange things begin happening around the convent, including what appears to be an immaculate conception. The trailer gives off some serious "Suspiria," "Don't Look Now," and "Rosemary's Baby" vibes, and Sweeney is also serving as a producer on the film under her Fifty-Fifty Films banner.
Sweeney is no stranger to horror fare (having previously appeared in "The Ward," "Nocturne," and "Night Teeth"), but it's her continued collaboration with Michael Mohan that has me the most excited. Sweeney became a household name playing Cassie Howard on "Euphoria," but for my money, two of her most fascinating performances have been in "Everything Sucks!" and "The Voyeurs," both projects with Mohan at the helm.
Everything Sucks! was too good for this world
Created by Mohan and Ben York Jones, the sole season of the Netflix series "Everything Sucks!" arrived the same year that Sweeney had recurring roles on both "The Handmaid's Tale" and "Sharp Objects." While both of those shows fall under the "prestige TV" banner, it was the '90s-set coming-of-age series that first seriously put Sweeney on my radar. Set in Borin, Oregon in 1996, "Everything Sucks!" was about a group of teenagers working together to make a movie, while also processing the trials and tribulations of growing up in an honest and authentic way. Sweeny played Emaline Addario, a high school junior and the leading lady of the school's drama club. She had huge emotions, flashy outfits, and deeply rooted insecurities hidden by a wall of performative "theatre kid" behavior.
There was a bit of controversy when Emaline developed a crush on co-star Peyton Kennedy's character Kate because Sweeney performed her role at the age of 20 while Kennedy was only 14. However, Kennedy has gone on record multiple times to discuss how safe, secure, and comfortable she felt on set and with Sweeney, including an on-screen kiss. Teenage queerness is still very rare to see in mainstream entertainment, but "Everything Sucks!" took such care in telling Kate and Emaline's stories that the show undoubtedly saved lives.
It's the antidote to the kind of criticisms lobbied at a series like "Euphoria," and a bevy of talented young would-be stars. Seriously, Kennedy, Jahi Di'Allo Winston, and Elijah Stevenson should be as well-known as the "Stranger Things" cast. "Everything Sucks!" was a show too good for this world, a series with so much sincere heart and vulnerability that it's no wonder our increasingly cynical, sardonic, and uncomfortable world didn't know what to do with it.
You must seek out The Voyeurs
Mohan and Sweeney joined forces again in 2021 with the totally slept-on Prime Video film "The Voyeurs." Sweeney stars with Justice Smith as a young couple who move into an apartment and quickly realize their windows look directly into an apartment across the street. The two become fixated on spying on their neighbors and even come up with fake names for the couple across the street and make up imaginary stories behind their actions, but take their obsession to a new level when they begin spying on their conversations and inserting themselves into their lives. From there, the film descends into full-tilt psycho-sexual pandemonium and takes some wild swings seldom given the green light in our current storytelling-by-way-of-algorithm landscape of cinema.
To be quite honest, a lot of people didn't fully get "The Voyeurs," instead tediously drawing comparisons to the David Lynch, Brian De Palma, and Alfred Hitchcock films that clearly inspired it. Everyone involved knows damn well what flavor of delightfully batsh*t bedlam the film is chasing, and isn't afraid to be a true-to-form erotic thriller. This is the kind of movie you'd stay up late to see on Cinemax in 1994 and pray your parents don't walk in and ask what you're watching. It's a film so unbelievably horny that any of the weird decisions the characters made can easily be waved away knowing that the characters certainly aren't getting enough blood to the brain with that much lust pulsing through them.
The pairing of Sweeney/Mohan is one worth celebrating, and now that these two are throwing nunsploitation onto their resumes, you can bet that we're going to get something absolutely riveting out of the collaboration. "Immaculate" arrives in theaters on March 22, 2024, and I can't wait to see the delicious blasphemy on the big screen.