89 min | R | March 22, 2024 | Neon
Sydney Sweeney produces and stars in a nunsploitation horror film set in an Italian convent. The final act is ferocious. This is not the Sydney Sweeney movie the industry expected.
Sister Cecilia is a young American nun who arrives at a remote Italian convent devoted to caring for elderly sisters. She is devout and eager and trusting. The convent welcomes her warmly. Then she becomes miraculously pregnant despite being a virgin. The convent’s warmth becomes something else entirely. The premise borrows from Rosemary’s Baby and every convent horror film ever made. The film knows its lineage and does not try to hide it. What it does is commit to the horror with a ferocity that the genre rarely delivers.
Sydney Sweeney plays Cecilia with a vulnerability that makes her terror feel earned. She is not a final girl in the traditional sense. She is a woman of faith whose faith is being weaponized against her. Sweeney produced this film herself and the choice says something about where she wants to take her career. Álvaro Morte plays Father Sal Tedeschi with priestly authority that curdles into something sinister. Simona Tabasco and Benedetta Porcaroli play fellow nuns with different relationships to the convent’s secrets.
Michael Mohan directs with restraint for the first two acts and then abandons it completely for the third. The Italian convent setting is shot with golden light and Gothic shadow. The production design creates a world that feels sacred and claustrophobic. The horror builds slowly through institutional control and bodily violation. When the film finally unleashes its violence in the final twenty minutes, the payoff is shocking and cathartic and deeply uncomfortable.
The final scene is one of the most confrontational endings released by a major distributor in years. Sweeney commits to it completely. The film makes a statement about bodily autonomy and institutional control over women’s bodies that is impossible to miss and impossible to look away from. This is genre filmmaking with teeth. Neon knew what it had and released it without apology.