Last month, the Motion Picture Association ratings board announced that they had given the psychological horror film Immaculate, which reunites Sydney Sweeney with Michael Mohan, who directed her in the erotic thriller The Voyeurs and the Netflix series Everything Sucks!, an R rating for strong and bloody violent content, grisly images, nudity and some language. Now, in an interview with Variety, Mohan has promised that the film gets extreme, just like that rating explanation indicated.

Scripted by Andrew Lobel, Immaculate sees Sweeney taking on the role of Cecilia, a woman of devout faith who is offered a fulfilling new role at an illustrious Italian convent. Her warm welcome to the picture-perfect Italian countryside is soon interrupted as it becomes clearer to Cecilia that her new home harbors some dark and horrifying secrets.

Simona Tabasco (The White Lotus), Alvaro Morte (Money Heist), Benedetta Porcaroli (Baby), and Dora Romano (The Hand of God) are also in the cast.

During his Variety interview, Mohan also revealed that this is a project that Sweeney first auditioned for a decade ago. He said, “It’s the first film I’ve directed that I did not write myself. Andrew Lobel wrote this script about 18 years ago, and in the mid-2010s it was about to be made with a studio. Sydney, when she was 15 or 16, auditioned for the lead role. The character wasn’t a nun back then — it was a high schooler — and she was one of the last two people up for the role. Then it just sort of evaporated. Andrew stepped away from the business at that point. He was fed up and went and worked in video games for a while. Years later, Sydney does Euphoria Season 2, and all of her fans are going, ‘You need to do a horror movie.’ She wanted to get into producing too, and so they were reading every single script around town, just trying to find something that resonated. And she said, ‘You know what? The best horror script I ever read was this thing I auditioned for. I wonder if I can resurrect it.’ Imagine you’re Andrew Lobel, you get a phone call, and it’s Sydney Sweeney on the other end, saying, ‘Hey, I auditioned for your script 10 years ago. Do you think I could make it?’ And she did. She sent the script to me, and when I read it… it takes a lot to shock me. When I saw the different reveals that happen in the script, I genuinely didn’t see them coming, and I’m someone who writes movies with lots of twist endings.“

Mohan said he drew inspiration from classics like Rosemary’s Baby, Don’t Look Now, and The Exorcist will working on Immaculate, film where, “you feel intimate with the main characters, yet they are cinematic. Even though the stories are told in these elegant and classy ways, they have this sense of danger. In The Exorcist, there are images in that film that movies today have not topped, in terms of how disturbing they are. So that’s what I wanted to do: make the boldest film I possibly could that will, hopefully, stand the test of time and get under your skin. … I think this horror movie is a popcorn movie first and foremost. It’s a roller coaster ride, but the ending is fucking extreme. People are going to walk away having an extreme reaction to it, and that’s all her. She wants to push the envelope, but she wants to do it thoughtfully. I know she loves the movie, and I’m proud of us for not pulling our punches.“

The director also disagreed with the recent study that found that Gen Z is less interested in seeing sex and sensuality depicted onscreen, as he feels, “They’re watching it, they’re just not admitting to watching it.” He also feels that it’s necessary for sex and sensuality to be onscreen, describing it as “a spice that is missing in our current cinematic landscape that we absolutely need.” He added that there was a scene in the Immaculate script where Cecilia and a friend (Porcaroli’s character) have a heart-to-heart conversation, and he chose to have the characters have that talk while in a bathtub, wearing gowns that are “a little bit sheer.” He said, “The fact that it’s sexy is not a bad thing. It is OK to make movies that are sexy. And if that’s something that you’re not into, don’t watch. That’s not the audience I’m going for.“

Sweeney produced the film through her company Fifty-Fifty Films, alongside Jonathan Davino. Also producing are Teddy Schwarzman and Michael Heimler of Black Bear and Middle Child Pictures’ David Bernad, who developed the project with Sweeney after they worked together on the Emmy-winning series The White Lotus. Will Greenfield and Black Bear’s John Friedberg and Christopher Casanova serve as executive producers. Black Bear provided the financing.

Immaculate is set to reach theatres on March 22nd. Will you be catching this one on the big screen? Let us know by leaving a comment below.

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