Immaculate (M18)

89 minutes, opens on May 9
3 stars

The story: Young novitiate Sister Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney) arrives at a remote Catholic convent in the Italian countryside to take her vows and discovers her new home is sheer evil.

If only Cecilia had heeded the advice of a concerned nun (Benedetta Porcaroli) to return to the United States.

Or caught the prologue, in which a panicky nun attempting a desperate escape from the 17th-century monastery is buried alive.

Too late now. The American religious horror Immaculate, clocking in at under 90 minutes, wastes little time in rolling out the physical and psychological terrors beyond the initial generic creaking doors and mysterious screams in the night.

Cecilia, a pious virgin, becomes pregnant. Her “immaculate conception” – proclaimed a miracle by the unholy trinity of the shady senior priest (Alvaro Morte), the Cardinal (Giorgio Colangeli) and the Mother Superior (Dora Romano) – is in truth a monstrosity.

It is Rosemary’s Baby (1968) reconceived in the luridly gory aesthetics of the 1970s Italian giallo pictures of Dario Argento and Mario Bava.

The frights, all the torture, mutilation and bloodletting are intense if shallow because of the thinness of the story. Viewers learn nothing of Cecilia other than she understands no Italian, and is scared, confused and utterly alone.

But Sweeney’s performance is full-on in this, her second thriller with director Michael Mohan after The Voyeurs (2021).

And the story about female bodily autonomy is especially charged in the light of the rollback on abortion rights in the US over the past year.

Sweeney is thrilling in Cecilia’s arc from wide-eyed purity to hellfire fury. Her final act is berserk.

Hot take: Watch this for Sweeney. The producer-cum-star delivers three bloody trimesters of escalating freakout.

Asphalt City (R21)

125 minutes, opens on May 9
3 stars

The story: This adaptation of the 2008 novel Black Flies – also the movie’s original title at its Cannes Film Festival premiere – by former ambulance driver Shannon Burke is an immersive ride alongside two New York City Fire Department paramedics, rescuing lives and witnessing deaths on their night shifts.

Tye Sheridan and Sean Penn make up the rookie-mentor pair of Asphalt City.

Sheridan’s Ollie Cross is mere weeks into the job, which covers his Chinatown room rent while he studies for his medical school examinations.

He is partnered with Penn’s Gene “Rut” Rutkovsky, a veteran whose soul has become as battered as his face.

Director Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out The Dead (1999) had Nicolas Cage as a burned-out paramedic, and grasped how gruelling the profession is.

French film-maker Jean-Stephane Sauvaire (Johnny Mad Dog, 2008) here gets the danger too. His American docudrama courses through a Brooklyn hellscape of flashing ambulance lights and blaring sirens, into the predominantly ethnic communities for close-quarter episodes with gunshot victims, domestic assault victims, gangbangers, heroin addicts and the homeless.

Neither the messianic symbolism of his name nor the angel wings emblazoned on his jacket can deliver Cross from incipient despair.

This study of the first responders’ psychological toll is indeed so punishing, it is near numbing.

But it can also be compelling because of the two strong leads.

There may be no better actor than Penn at inhabiting such stark material. Rut comes to question whether these dregs of humanity portrayed by non-professional locals even deserve to be saved, and Penn makes viewers understand why Rut would eventually cross the ethical line to tragic consequences.

Hot take: No fun being an emergency medical assistant. This urban thriller is unsparing in replicating the bleakness.