Sydney Sweeney’s Growing Empire
Immaculate is obsessed with Sydney Sweeney’s face. It’s not news that the camera loves the actor, who has fast become Hollywood’s newest ingenue. But Immaculate, a horror film set in a convent, is a Sweeney showcase in the smartest possible way, devoting much of its running time to her wide-eyed, trembling visage as she encounters all kinds of demonic nastiness. It’s a straightforward piece of genre silliness, an 89-minute thrill fest crammed with the requisite jump scares and creepy religious imagery. But it’s also part of a larger body of evidence that Sweeney, unlike the guileless characters she often portrays, is carefully constructing her career in ways that suit her skill set.
Consider Madame Web, the comic-book movie that starred Dakota Johnson as a laconic superhero and featured Sweeney in a supporting role. The film was so noxious that it became an instant cult classic (although I stress that it’s quite bad), with Johnson herself practically reveling in its ineptitude while publicizing the movie. Sweeney got in a few of her own licks: “You might have seen me in Anyone but You or Euphoria,” she said in her opening monologue when hosting Saturday Night Live. “You definitely did not see me in Madame Web.”
It’s a clever line, but the movie still should feel like something of an embarrassing credit for the actor, who’s largely been on a hot streak since breaking out in Euphoria and the first season of The White Lotus. (The romantic comedy Anyone but You, released late last year, garnered middling reviews but had surprising box-office legs.) Yet in a recent interview, Sweeney candidly noted that her participation in Madame Web was a “building block” in her relationship with Sony, the film’s distributor. “Everything in my career I do not just for that story, but [for] strategic business decisions,” she said. “Because I did that, I was able to sell Anyone but You. I was able to get Barbarella” (a remake of the chintzy sci-fi movie that is currently in development).
Sweeney is not the first actor to smartly partner up with a studio, but kudos to her for being so transparent. Indeed, her self-branding as a wheeler-dealer is yet another step in her savvy journey up the industry ladder. Sweeney didn’t just star in Anyone but You—she also produced it, something her co-star Glen Powell didn’t get to do. She’s also a producer on Immaculate, which allowed her to hire a director—Michael Mohan—with whom she’s collaborated before.
[Read: 10 “scary” movies for people who don’t like horror]
Mohan previously directed Sweeney in The Voyeurs, an underrated direct-to-streaming movie that debuted on Amazon in 2021. Like Immaculate, The Voyeurs harkens back to old genre favorites—it’s basically a knockoff of a 1980s Brian De Palma thriller—while giving Sweeney opportunities to wildly emote as she tries to investigate a suspicious neighbor and gets in way over her head. Both movies have the right transgressive edge, borrowing from better forebears to create a product that entertains without taking itself too seriously.
In Immaculate, Sweeney plays Cecilia, a nun who is sent to a convent in Italy that tends to dying nuns. There’s plenty of shady stuff going on behind closed doors, but before Cecilia can really dig into what’s happening, she finds herself pregnant. Given that she’s a virgin, the priests seclude her away in hushed reverence, hopeful that she’s carrying a future messiah. Of course, darker forces are at work, but Immaculate is only vaguely concerned with laying out the details. As I mentioned earlier, the primary character is Sweeney’s face—especially her saucer eyes, which blink with horror at every twisted turn.
I’ve struggled with seeing Sweeney play a “normal” person—her character in Anyone but You is a frazzled law student who tackles human concerns such as “how to find a boyfriend without attachment issues” or “how to clean her pants after she spills coffee on them.” Sweeney’s flatly delivered exhortations about how her life is such a mess right now just don’t gel with her movie-star luminosity. Her greatest strength, as demonstrated in Euphoria and now in Immaculate, lies in communicating very big, broad emotions—crying, screaming, staring agog at the kind of satanic chaos that shakes the spirit of God’s most devoted servants. In a single take near the end of this film, she utters a guttural roar before committing a shocking act of violence—at this, Sweeney is a pure natural.
But she shouldn’t be pigeonholed as a scream queen, either. In fact, Sweeney’s best screen performance remains the 2023 drama Reality, where she played the real-life American intelligence leaker Reality Winner in a film that took every line of dialogue from real-life FBI transcripts of Winner’s interrogation. There, Sweeney’s dull affect belies her confusion and fear over her arrest. But that film also uses her expressiveness to build mounting unease, countering the situation’s mundanity with the creeping terror growing on Sweeney’s face.
Whatever the next move for Sweeney, she’s undoubtedly been enshrined as one of Hollywood’s hot young stars. Euphoria will be back eventually, and she’s in a couple more thrillers due out this year. Sweeney’s HBO co-star Zendaya, another major new Hollywood presence, has proved to be a similarly sharp figure, positioning herself in the Marvel universe while working with A-tier filmmakers such as Denis Villeneuve and Luca Guadagnino. Sweeney is charting a different, pulpier path—and although Immaculate will not be earning any Oscars, it’s a scream.