This article contains spoilers for Immaculate.

Immaculate ends with its best scene. In Neon’s new horror movie, Sydney Sweeney plays Cecilia, a young woman from Detroit, Michigan who travels to Italy to take her vows at Our Lady of Sorrows, a convent doubling as a care home for elderly nuns. It doesn't take long for her to realize that something is amiss, as mysterious cloaked figures in red masks begin lurking the halls.

Things become significantly more amiss when Cecilia finds out that she's pregnant, despite being a virgin. The twist is that the priest in charge of the convent, Father Tedeschi (Álvaro Morte) isn't just a man of faith, he's a man of (mad) science, using biological residue from a relic dating back to the crucifixion in the most recent of many attempts to reproduce Christ's DNA in one of the nun's wombs. The ol' 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Jurassic Park Jesus scheme. This time he's chosen Cecilia.

In the final scene, Cecilia's water breaks during an attempt to escape the convent. After killing Father Tedeschi and crawling out into the daylight, she begins to give birth. The scene that follows is a showstopper, staying tight on Sweeney's face for minutes as she gives birth — with some of the most believable, intense screams of pain I can remember seeing in a movie.

We hear the labored breathing of what we can assume is another of Tedeschi's failures as Cecilia grabs a heavy rock from nearby, and crushes her offspring as the film cuts to credits. And, according to Sweeney and director Michael Mohan, they nailed it on the first take.

"So, that day was an interesting day," Sweeney says over Zoom. "We only had the location for a short amount of time and we had the ending of the catacombs [sequence] in that same spot inside. So it was this really cool old dilapidated building and we shot the last scene outside of it and then the ending of the catacomb escape was inside the building. We built the tunnel. And so we had to do all the stunt work with Alvaro and my [prosthetic] belly the same day as that last, last scene.&🍃quot;

Even if the first take wasn’t the best, ܫthe crew didn’t have much time toꦿ get it right. As Sweeney says herself:

We 🌄were fighting daylight, we were fighting time, all of it.

"We were fighting daylight, we were fighting time, all of it, and we needed to reset Alvaro's prosthetics. So we only had a certain amount of time to fit this in. I remember we were walking around finding the perfect location for the lighting and to not have to move video village. And we're like, okay, we'll hold the camera here. I'll walk over here and I'll come back. And they're like, do you want to rehearse it? Do you know what you want to do? And I'm like, let's just go for it and see what happens. And so what you see on screen is the first take."

Director Michael Mohan confirmed th༺at Sweeney had it right the first time (though they did shoot three more safety takes, just in case),ꦏ saying "the end of this movie is the thing I am most proud of in my career."

"It's very easy for me to envision something like a two-minute long unbroken take where we're just on Sydney; it's easy for me to dream that up because I know Sydney can do it," Mohan, who previously worked with Sweeney on the erotic thriller The Voyeurs and high school dramedy series Everything Sucks, says.

"On the day when we were shooting it we blocked it out," he says. "'Okay, you're gonna stand [here], we're gonna be against this tree, then you're gonna walk over here then you're gonna walk back.' We roughly blocked it out, but we did not rehearse it, and what is in the movie is take one."

Mohan says that he likes the you-are-there nature of the shot and the "happy accidents" that are present in the finished film. "There's a magic to the first take," he says, "because there's a moment where she breathes and it actually fogs up the lens and I just love that."

It's an impressive demonstration of Sweeney's ability as a star, and reason enough on its own to check Immaculate out. It opens in theaters in the United States in Canada on March 22.