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The opening shot of Immaculate shows a painting of the Virgin Mary, clad in blue, while someone recites the Ave Maria in Italian nearby.

A girl, who appears to be a nun, sneaks into an adjacent room. She finds a set of keys and runs off, trying to escape by the front gate. Floodlights come on, and a posse of dark-clad nuns pursue her. They brutally break her leg in an open fracture at the knee; she will not be escaping anywhere anytime soon.

Fade to black as the young nun loses consciousness. When she comes to, we realize she’s been buried alive. She screams for help, lights a match to see the interior of her coffin, and cries. And we fade to black again, assuming rightly that this young nun will die. Something evil is going on at this convent, and it’s targeting young women.

We get plenty of time to feel this young nun’s panic, her isolation, her entrapment, and, of course, her mortality. As the opening credits roll in darkness, we hear her desperate screams echo impotently off the walls of her fatal prison.

When the camera again fills with light, we are looking at a young woman named Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney), in a nun’s habit, watching Italian border control go through her bag. One of the agents keeps commenting on how beautiful and young she is, and how she is wasting her life as a nun. He strongly implies that she will regret her choice because she’s opting out of having a sexual life, a married life, a reproductive life. That may seem like incidental information, but Cecilia’s youth, sexual vulnerability, and fertility are very important to the logic of the film, so take note.

Also important to the logic of the film is her name: deriving from the Latin word caeca, which describes a woman who is blind, dark, gloomy, hidden, or confused. Cecilia is the perfect name for this soon-to-be-sequestered, deer-in-the-headlights-looking, moody, and, as we’ll soon see, naively blind young woman.

Cecilia gets picked up by a driver, who conveys her to the remote convent from the opening sequences of the film.

As we move out into the countryside, our hackles rise – this feels too much like the opening sequence of The Shining, as we understand how isolated our heroine is about to be.

The music in this scene is vaguely Christian chorale, with high women’s voices, but there are low, heavy bass pulses in the background that again strongly invoke the opening sound design of The Shining.

When the car pulls into the nunnery’s parking area, Cecilia peers vacantly out into the rain, her face illegible, impassive. The building is clean but forbiddingly institutional.

Inside, the Reverend Mother greets her warmly, but Cecilia can’t understand a word she says because Cecilia doesn’t speak Italian. She learns from another young nun named Isabelle that this place is where elderly nuns go to die and to be cared for by the other sisters of the convent.

“Death is a part of everyday life here,” Isabelle says, in a strangely hostile, menacing tone.

The tour guide gives Cecilia precious little time to contemplate what’s happening to her, instead ushering her deeper and deeper into the belly of the building. The scale and internal twistiness of the convent – aptly named Our Lady of Sorrows – seems to engulf and imperil her; by contrast with it, Cecilia seems woefully small, trusting, and simple.

Simple indeed: Cecilia’s backstory is very spare. She’s from Michigan and nearly drowned as a child under winter ice in the Saginaw River. She became a nun because she believes God saved her from that horrific death. Since her parish back in Michigan closed, she’s come to Italy to find her true home among the sisters. She is, in effect, a refugee from her own childhood trauma.

She presents as very humble, very quiet, very easily cowed. She has trouble making or maintaining eye contact and often appears dazed and disoriented.

Her face wears a loose, open expression, as if she is chronically unable to make sense of what’s around her. And no wonder: We soon understand that what’s around her is really, really crazy.

Soon, the Reverend Mother shows Cecilia a very large nail and reveals that it’s a nail from the True Cross, on which Jesus suffered the Passion and died. Perhaps overwhelmed by religious devotion, or thunderstruck by the idea of being in the same room with a nail that contributed to God’s human death, or perhaps because she had been drugged —indeed, she blinks hard and wobbles, looking very much like someone who has been roofied – Cecilia loses consciousness upon hearing this revelation.

In the following scenes, we follow Cecilia through a complex dream sequence-strongly reminiscent of Rosemary’s when she is drugged by Guy and Minnie.

In Cecilia’s “dream,” she attempts to make confession before a priest, only to realize that the priest is somehow moving away from her. She calls after him, but suddenly she is grabbed from behind and pulled through wallpaper into another room. Everything shifts: A loud, bass-heavy, hammering song with screeching metallic overtones slams in, and we’re focused close on Cecilia’s panicking face, lit by a flickering deep crimson light.

She is lying down, and we are seeing things from her vantage point – recalling Rosemary’s posture and point of view during her rape scene. At her feet, a group of masked nuns are doing something to her. Other nuns are pawing at her face and mouth. We see one nun lift up what appears to be the nail from the True Cross and drive it down toward Cecilia’s abdomen, in an unmistakable and extremely sacrilegious figure for rape.

Cecilia wakes up, shocked and terrified, in her bed. She, like Rosemary, thinks the whole thing was a dream. We, the audience of this film, know entirely too well that it was not a dream. Because we’ve seen this movie before, in 1968.

Cecilia attempts to move forward with her new life. There’s a surprisingly cheerful training montage, in which Cecilia learns how to do the laundry, how to tend to the dying nuns’ wounds, who the on-staff doctor is, and how to slaughter and butcher chickens for the nuns’ dinner.

During this time, Cecilia befriends a young Italian nun named Guendalina (Benedetta Porcaroli); we see them laughing and talking animatedly with each other and with the dying nuns whom they care for. Maybe, just maybe, Cecilia will be okay here, we think.

This training montage is the emotional equivalent of the family snapshots of the Thorns that we get in The Omen, lulling us, along with our protagonist, into a false sense of comfort and security. They serve to establish the domestic sphere as a safe, comfortable, warm, loving place, when, in fact, the domestic sphere will soon turn ugly, violent, and abusive.

The film leans toward that reality in a bathing scene, when Guendalina brushes Cecilia’s hair and reveals to her that she is a domestic abuse survivor.

Evidently, Guendalina met some nuns at a domestic abuse support group and started to think that maybe the way out of patriarchal violence and abuse was to join the Catholic Church, take vows, become a nun, and forswear human heterosexuality forever.

Guendalina thought to herself, “These women have a very good life. They have a place to live, a job where they can keep their clothes on, nothing to worry about, so I signed up.”

Marrying Christ and retreating into a convent, for Guendalina, appeared a far safer proposition than marrying a man and retreating into the domestic sphere, only to be battered again. Cecilia responds to these disclosures first with a blank, vapid smile, and then – out of nowhere – with severe retching and vomiting.

Guendalina assumes that her story about domestic abuse and her pragmatic reasons for becoming a nun had turned Cecilia’s stomach. There is no hint in this scene that she vomits due to pregnancy, but we – who have seen prior incarnations of this film -begin to suspect.

Unsurprisingly, it soon emerges through medical testing of Cecilia’s urine at the convent that Cecilia is pregnant. At first, her superiors are critical of her, assuming she’s had sexual relations with a man. But as they come to believe she has not had sinful relations – by checking and confirming that her hymen is still intact – everyone around her changes, becoming excited, enthusiastic, and fawning. It’s as if they had somehow been planning for this, preparing for her pregnancy, which they understand as a miracle, a renewed prospect of a Virgin birth.

Cecilia is far less sanguine about it. In fact, she retains her general air of confusion, disbelief, and disorientation throughout these scenes of interrogation and disclosure – even when she, surrounded by priests and doctors, is subjected to an ultrasound and sees a fetus growing inside her.

The clergy rejoice; they tell Cecilia that it’s a miracle, but she knows different. Miracles don’t generally start with dreams of a nail being jammed into one’s abdomen.

As soon as the clergy at the convent are convinced Cecilia has conceived without sin, they drape her in blue, flowing robes, following the traditional iconography of the Virgin Mary.

Simultaneously, of course, the film thereby makes tangential contact with Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen, in each of which a young, reproductively abused mother is routinely bedecked in blue.

Everyone in the nunnery is made to worship Cecilia, standing at the altar in front of the chapel, while she appears lost and anxious. With good reason, because things start going south very quickly as she enters her second trimester.

Vomiting up her own teeth into a toilet, Cecilia comes to realize the physical danger she’s in. Something is seriously wrong with her pregnancy, just as something was seriously wrong with Rosemary’s. During an ultrasound performed in the convent by the convent doctor, she’s informed that the baby “appears to be okay,” and Cecilia haltingly asserts, “But, I’m, I’m, I’m not okay.” She begs for access to another doctor and to a real hospital, where she can get better quality care.

Father Tedeschi, who had initially invited her to join this convent and has emerged as her main contact person about her pregnancy, refuses, saying it’s safer for the savior if she stays where she is. Safer, that is, for the presumed savior, who is a fetus.

The film is running directly at the core conflict around abortion: Whose life matters more, a woman’s or a fetus’s? And the film is heavily loading the question, because the latent idea that animates much of pro-fetal logic-which is that every baby can be a miracle, if given the chance to grow and thrive – is literally, explicitly true here. Or, at least, that’s how the clergy see it.

Cecilia’s safety, her bodily health, her needs, her wishes, all of these things are secondary to doing what’s safest for the savior – baby. It is a terrifying situation for Cecilia, mostly because she doesn’t entirely understand what’s going on or what’s happened to her.

We know, however, that she has somehow been raped and impregnated, and that she is now being forced to carry the resultant pregnancy to term.

Made more than fifty years after Rosemary’s Baby, this 2024 domestic horror is animated by the same understanding that animated the classic film: the awareness that-absent federal protections for women’s reproductive agency – women can be forced to carry their pregnancies to term against their will.

The reason for this resurgence of attention to this horrific possibility is simple: From the vantage point of reproductive rights, we are getting perilously close to 1968 again.

Pointedly, we are not alone in our understanding. The film makes clear that Guendalina, the domestic violence survivor, also has the requisite perspective to see what’s really happening to Cecilia. Father Tedeschi tries to stop Guendalina from speaking out, but she, the domestic abuse survivor, says, simply, “Non mi toccare. Fuck this.” “Don’t touch me,” of course, is a phrase domestic abuse survivors know entirely too well. But it is also what Jesus says to Mary Magdalene after his resurrection: noli me tangere.

Guendalina here emerges, albeit subtly, as the true savior figure here, the one who, like Jesus, will speak truth to authoritarian power and advocate for those without it. She pushes past Tedeschi and makes an impassioned speech in Italian in front of everyone at the convent, at the top of a staircase. In her speech, Guendalina points out how impossible and mysterious the recent events have been – Cecilia’s pregnancy, the sudden violent suicide of another nun. All the nuns stare at her in shock. Father Tedeschi tries again to stop her, and she turns on him, shouting out in Italian, “Let go of me! I know when a man is lying to me!” The film makes it clear that Guendalina is better equipped than anyone else to protest the obvious reproductive horror at work in the film because she has lived with the demon of domestic abuse, too.

Listen to survivors, the film suggests. They are the ones in the best position to identify domestic abuse when they see it, and they are often the most inclined to protest.

After Guendalina has been roughly taken away, Cecilia starts to search for more information. She finds a file containing a newspaper clipping about her near-death experience as a child, as well as a chromosomal analysis of her genetics.

Wandering around the convent late at night, she finds a torture chamber in which Guendalina’s tongue is being cut out; evidently, marrying Christ was not a safer proposition for her than marrying a man.

Understandably, Cecilia begins to assess her situation as one of the highest peril. She knows she has to try to escape Our Lady of the Sorrows in order to preserve herself from whatever lurid conspiracy is going on around her.

In the next scene, a group of nuns rushes into Cecilia’s bedroom as she screams in pain. Blood appears to be flowing from her body onto the bed. It looks like she is experiencing a placental abruption or perhaps an ectopic pregnancy rupture. Whatever the exact nature of the problem, it is clearly an obstetric emergency, and even the conspiratorial nuns and priests immediately register that. So, in order to save the baby growing in her womb against her will, the nuns and priests at the convent rush Cecilia to a local hospital with her screaming in the backseat of the car. It’s a painful scene to watch, and one we’re likely to see more of in real life in the coming years.

Back at the convent, a nun cries and prays over the bloodied bedsheets Cecilia left behind, burying her face in them and kissing them. In so doing, she spies a mutilated chicken under the bed. Cecilia hadn’t been hemorrhaging; she had doused herself in chicken blood to fake a gestational catastrophe. The nun contacts the priests in the car with Cecilia; they haul Cecilia back to the convent and bind and brand her. She’s made into livestock, effectively—a brood sow.

“This is not God’s work,” she says. The priest responds, “If it’s not God’s work, why isn’t He stopping us?” A great question, and a chilling one.

What Immaculate does with that question is by far the most interesting choice the film makes. Provoked by the question of why God doesn’t help Cecilia and stop the corrupt clergy, Cecilia decides not to reject God and instead gets weaponized by her faith. Put otherwise, she decides to have faith in the very relics and signs of faith that she, as a devout Catholic, has learned to venerate and love.

When she’s at last alone with the nun who’s guarding her, Cecilia grabs a heavy, huge crucifix and slams the nun who is guarding her in the head twice. Then there’s the gruesome kill shot, where Cecilia crucifixes her right into the eye and smashes up the rest of her face. It appears that in this case, God is stopping them after all; evidently, the Lord helps those who help themselves. Cecilia’s escape doesn’t happen because she turns away from God but because she leans toward Christianity as a kind of warrior religion for terrorized women.

As Cecilia escapes from her bedroom, with the nun she just killed splayed on the floor, she walks out into the hallway, moaning loudly, when her water breaks. Now in active labor, Cecilia tries to escape the convent through the catacombs, but Father Tedeschi finds her and attempts an unanesthetized C-section on her. We watch the blade slither across Cecilia’s swollen abdomen; we hear her scream in agony as blood pours forth. To call this reproductive violence would be to wildly understate the case.

Fortunately, Cecilia has swiped and pocketed the nail from the True Cross, and, wrestling with Tedeschi on the floor of the catacombs, she jams it into his jugular, killing him instantly. The Lord again helps those who help themselves – this time with relics of the Passion.

Covered in Father Tedeschi’s blood and her own, Cecilia crawls out of the catacombs and gives birth outside. She looks at the baby, and we see her wide-eyed, horrified face; this is another obvious reference to Rosemary’s Baby, when Rosemary gazes in transfixed horror at her and Satan’s goat-eyed offspring. This scene, however, is when the most important difference between Rosemary’s Baby and Immaculate comes into play; it is a difference that retroactively highlights the importance of this film’s incessant references to the earlier one.

Cecilia cuts the umbilical cord with her teeth and then grabs a huge rock; in the background, we can see the baby. Although it’s very blurry, this baby does not look normal. Her face covered in her own blood, and her eyes frozen wide in horror both at what she sees and what she’s about to do, Cecilia raises the rock above her head and smashes her offspring while screaming her head off. Cut to black.

So let’s recap the relation of this film to Rosemary’s Baby. In both, a virginal, virtuous, innocent woman is raped and impregnated against her will while in some kind of altered state. There is a group of religious worshippers (clergy in Immaculate; Satanists in Rosemary) who are coercively controlling the pregnant woman, denying her access to medical care, refusing to let her leave the premises, determining what she eats, drinks, and wears as well as whom she’s allowed to associate with.

In Rosemary’s Baby, the baby is the Antichrist, and the Satanists are hoping for a new world order of Satan. In Immaculate, the baby is supposed to be the reincarnation of Christ himself -using DNA, as we learn, that’s been culled from the nail from the True Cross. The Christ-baby, however, is supposed to usher in a new world order, too, one that, as Cecilia eventually realizes, may well be destructive.

Immaculate reboots Rosemary’s Baby for the twenty-first century, and loudly trumpets its affiliation with that lineage.

But “reboots” is actually slightly imprecise. Really, Immaculate revises the Rosemary’s Baby story. In Rosemary’s Baby, Rosemary ultimately bows to her own innate and irrepressible maternal instinct – despite herself, despite her own horror, despite her muted urge to scream, in the end she finds herself rocking baby Adrian to sleep in his black cradle, deciding ultimately she will indeed mother the Antichrist. She’s a woman, after all; what choice does she have?

In Immaculate, Cecilia veers sharply the other way. She refuses to accept the obligation put on her by malicious clerics, who have so badly perverted Christianity in her mind. She refuses to raise a baby whom she perceives not only as a monster, but as a potential threat to Christianity itself.

Immaculate demonstrates that the Church should be in no position to enforce pregnancies on women, and that Christ himself would not want to be invoked in the service of such things. After all, there’s no comeuppance to Cecilia for murdering a nun with a crucifix or a priest with the nail from the True Cross. Quite the contrary: God allows Cecilia to get away – both from the convent and from her unwanted baby.

It appears that all the sacred relics and objects in this film are actively on her side—advocating for her to have agency over her body, helping her to escape imprisonment and dehumanization at the hands of the cultlike or even coven-like convent.

I’m not sure whether the filmmakers were trying to make an anti-Catholic or even anti-Christian film, but if so, they didn’t succeed. Instead, what they did was far more interesting. They made a film that actually asserts a fundamental allegiance between true Christianity – as embodied in the cross and the nail – and women’s rights to freedom, bodily autonomy, and reproductive choice.

When Cecilia emerges from the womb of the earth – the catacombs under the nunnery – doused in blood, it is she who is being reborn, not Jesus. She is being born into a new and newly empowered form of Christianity, one that prioritizes the life, bodily autonomy, and reproductive freedom of young women.

What the filmmakers did in this film was to envision a world in which true Christianity could actually line up in favor of women’s reproductive rights, even if that meant escaping from the institutions – like the convent – that would seem to represent true Christianity. In that sense, the film is decisively a post-Dobbs reproductive horror, fully aware of the way in which Christian doctrine gets deployed to curb women’s reproductive choices, and fully aware that that deployment will put women’s lives in grave danger unless they come out, like Cecilia, fighting for their lives.