Immaculate has one hell of an ending. Perhaps you’ve already heard the whispers traveling across film discourse with hushed secrecy, a subdued reverence that calls to mind the innocent times of The Sixth Sense and The Blair Witch Project. The energy in the room palpably shifts once the extended final shot begins, armrests wheezing under duress from clutching hands. Unfolding with elegant bad taste, it might be enough on its own to recommend the movie, or at least that was clearly the thinking involved. Everything leads to it, or, more precisely, everything leads out of it, a kernel that inspired a feature-length film, and not the other way around. 

This commitment to reverse engineering proves to be Immaculate’s north star, a recipe through which each of the film’s individual elements comes into focus. Despite being in some stage of development as early as 2014, the movie owes its existence to star Syndey Sweeney’s recent rise to fame, clearly financed as a means of getting the Euphoria star on the big screen as quickly and consistently as possible. It’s only a bad way of doing business if the parts don’t match, and campy horror is as solid a vehicle for Sweeney’s particular talents as anything else, but the material she’s given seems to be serving myriad masters all at once.

That aforementioned early iteration, which featured a high school setting, has somehow been relocated to a Roman Catholic convent in Italy, a seismic, seemingly impossible shift that allows the movie more freedom to explore its ostensible themes. It also affords it an welcome air of familiarity, and before diving into the off-balance ways in which Immaculate addresses its many buzzy culture war motifs, it’s worth mentioning that the floor on this sort of thing is only so low, especially with a competent hand on the steering wheel. Director Michael Mohan is just such a driver, perfectly content to play the hits one religious ceremony and jump scare at a time, eschewing invention in the name of comfort. As a weekend matinee, the flick dutifully hits its marks, and only finds fault when it hollowly gestures toward of-the-moment importance.

Those looking to avoid spoilers would be advised to ignore the film’s title, but even the savvy few capable of catching the New Testament allusion would be forgiven for not anticipating the Pro-Choice subtext. There’s something clever in casting Sweeney, whose body has become an inescapable talking point, in a story about the patriarchal drive to control women’s anatomical freedom at every turn, but Andrew Lobel’s script isn’t interested in political commentary. It’s more of the glad-handing type, providing lip service to modern concerns in a way that feels more strategic than impassioned.

That’s what you get when you build things backwards, landing on your themes before hashing out your story, zeroing in on an ending in advance of creating the path to get there. It’s a largely innocuous version of bad faith, harmlessly utilizing liberal ideology as corporate strategy, ticking off the Elevated Horror boxes to which we’ve all become accustomed. Immaculate isn’t bad; how poor can a movie really be when it uses catacombs and a crucifixion nail as its own homespun versions of Chekov’s gun? The kooky inhibition of the film’s best ideas and sequences should have been enough, because loosely attaching them to a mandated agenda doesn’t do the movie any favors.