I’m excited for the possibilities of a career by Sydney Sweeney. Plenty of actresses have started off with a career launching moment, only to be stuck in some truly forgettable films. I feel bad for Sweeney here because she so deeply believed in this film. She joined as a producer, because originally she wasn’t considered for the lead role, and then finally got her dream role. And her dream role was this?
Immaculate treads no new territory. I truly mean, when I heard the title, I predicted this movie almost perfectly. I feel like I should have writing credit. Aside from a few little super specific plot points, this film really does follow the path of least resistance. It goes always where you think it will go, and is like a religious horror paint by numbers film. Sweeney plays a new transfer to a nunnery in Europe (coming somewhere out of the States), and thanks to a painfully obvious opening sequence, we already know where she is is evil as hell. The bare minimum this film could have done was not to show its hand in a wasted opening sequence.
There’s a way to write an direct this to make it interesting, but this wasn’t it. It does work as a vehicle for Sweeney, as she is quite strong in the lead role. She has some truly horrifying and harrowing stuff required of her in the third act, and she handles all of it perfectly.
However, we do need to talk about the audio description. Narrator choice is everything. We have to make sure that we are choosing people who match thematically with the project they are being hired for. Light voices on dark horror films don’t match. This is something I’ve encountered more and more, and as we continue to push back against AI and argue that there’s this careful consideration done by voice talent that cannot be matched by artificial voices, we do need to pay attention to who we are aligning with what. that’s not to say that this narrator is incapable of narration, because I’ve heard them before on other projects, but there are many other darker tone voices that would have been right for this project. It’s not just one voice, but there are a few that I can think of that would have made sense, of any gender.
So, what Hollywood can do to help Sydney Sweeney is keep her away from films like Madame Webb and Immaculate. What the audio description community can do to continue to battle the prevalence of TTS description, is to embrace the artistry of the voice talent, which includes intentional casting from the beginning.
Final Grade: C