sydney sweeney

nocturne movie poster

I don’t know why I keep watching films made under the Blumhouse banner. They are all well made. They have good production values. They look great. They are often very well-acted and usually the direction is handled well. But there is something so slick, so generic about them that I find almost all of them instantly forgettable. They feel as if they are made by a committee in a factory instead of by a passionate creator with a specific point of view.

Nocturne is a perfect example of this. It has a decent story and it was obviously made by good craftsmen. But it feels like a retread of Black Swan with a bit of Whiplash thrown in but with no interesting ideas of its own.

Juliet (Sydney Sweeney) and Vivian Lowe (Madison Iseman) are twin sisters who have been training to become concert pianists from a very young age. Vivian is the prodigy having just been accepted to Julliard while Juliet did not get accepted, and as it was the only school she applied too will be taking a year off. They are both seniors at a prestigious music academy.

The film begins with another student, the best in her class committing suicide by jumping off a balcony. She was set to star in the senior showcase and now there is an empty spot. All seniors are welcome to apply.

Juliet accidentally discovers the dead girl’s theory notebook which is full of all kinds of mystical horror movie drawings. Naturally, she starts using it and naturally her musical skills improve dramatically.

The sisters don’t seem to like each other very much and their rivalry skyrockets now that they have the chance to star in the senior showcase.

All of this is a good setup for something interesting to happen. But it never does. I expected the notebook angle to go into supernatural occult territory. It seemed to think about doing exactly that, but then pulled back. Juliet keeps studying and playing the songs inside it. Her skills improve and her life begins mimicking the weird drawings inside. But she never takes it too far.

The sisters fight. One of them gets hurt. One of them cheats with the other one’s boyfriend, but again the film never really runs with these ideas. A film like this should take extremes. It doesn’t need to be sort of realistic.

It is a Blumhouse film so the production values are high. It looks good. I think Sydney Sweeney is a very fine actress, but there is nothing for her to really bite into here.

Two months from now I’ll be scrolling through Amazon and I’ll see this film pop up. I’ll have to look it up on Letterboxd to see if I’ve seen it before and I’ll be surprised by the answer.

poster

For various reasons, I don’t watch a lot of modern films. I almost never go to the theater anymore and at home I tend to go for classic movies or movies with at least a decade or two under their belt. I do watch new movies every now and again. Ones that get rave reviews eventually make it to my queue, but more often than not they don’t get watched until they are at least a few years old.

There isn’t a judgment hidden in that paragraph. I’ve got nothing against new movies, many of them are quite good, I’ve just become a classic movie fan. I like the history of those old movies. I like that even when I watch a bad movie that was made way before I was born it feels like it was worth watching. It helps me understand cinema better. Whereas when I watch a bad modern movie I feel like I’ve just wasted my time.

Watching a lot of old movies and not watching a lot of new ones tends to skew my perceptions of what’s popular. I miss a lot of trends. I don’t necessarily know all the new stars and filmmakers. I keep my nose in pop culture enough that I tend to know names and faces, but I haven’t always seen the films and shows from the newest, hottest celebrities.

This is the long way around to say I’ve only seen one other movie starring Sydney Sweeney (I think I’ve seen her in a couple of other films but in small roles where she wasn’t particularly noticeable).

I’ve been hearing Ms. Sweeney’s name a lot lately. For a hot minute, it seemed like she was everywhere. I’m not exactly sure why, I don’t pay that close attention to pop culture buzz. She was on Saturday Night Live I think and then there was something about her cleavage and her fame skyrocketed.

A few months ago I saw her in Reality, a pretty good movie based on a real-life story about a woman leaking secret documents to the media. I didn’t even realize it was Sweeney until the credits rolled. She was good in it and I made a note to check her out in other things.

This has been an even longer way around to say I just watched Sydney Sweeney star in Immaculate, a pretty okay horror film with an absolutely brilliant ending.

I’m tired. It has been a long day which concluded a long week. I ramble when I’m tired. Sorry.

In Immaculate Sweeney plays Sister Cecilia a Catholic novice who has just arrived at an Italian convent where she is to take her vows. She’s an American with no connection to Italy. She doesn’t even speak the language. But her previous church floundered due to lack of attendance and Father Tedeschi (Álvaro Morte) talked her into coming to Italy.

We get bits and pieces of her backstory. A near-death experience as a child left her feeling God has a plan for her, but she hasn’t quite figured out what that might be. It is never clear if her piousness is real and deeply felt, or if it stems from her need to find purpose.

At one point in the film another nun tells her that this convent is not the place to find herself, it is a place of hard work and devotion. Sister Cecilia swears she understands but she lacks conviction.

Strange things are afoot at the nunnery. Director Michael Mohan fills the screen with most of the tropes from this type of gothic religious horror film. If you are a fan you’ve seen most of what happens here before, and probably in better form. There are creepy nuns, creepier people in dark robes, disturbing priests, candle-filled rituals, and lots of jump scares.

Cecilia finds herself pregnant. She swears she’s never had sex before and we believe her as that’s where the title of the film comes from. I won’t spoil how this happened, but let’s just say the convent is more of a cult than a church (I’ll let you make your own jokes about how all churches are cult-like).

The thing is for the first two-thirds of the film’s run time it is all kind of tame. It isn’t bad necessarily, but it isn’t all that thrilling either. Like I say I’ve seen this done before, better. I never quite buy into Cecilia’s arc. I never felt like she was a true believer. But who she really is, isn’t explored very deeply.

But here’s the other thing, make it through those boring parts. The end is worth it. Sweeney is much more comfortable with the scream queen aspects of this role than the faith-filled parts. As things start to unravel (and boy do they unravel) I start to see why she’s become such a star. It concludes with a long take that’s really quite something.

And that’s all I’ll say about that.