Immaculate has reached digital platforms in the US, introducing a broader audience to its disturbing final scenes. Sydney Sweeney plays Sister Cecilia in this horror movie. Her character gets to a faraway convent in Italy, only to find out she’s carrying a pregnancy she didn’t expect.
Cardinal Franco Merola (played by Giorgio Colangeli) immediately declares the pregnancy as another Immaculate Conception, claiming it points to the return of Jesus. After that, the nuns begin treating Cecilia with extra care, almost like royalty.
Miracles or manipulation the line begins to blur (Photo: Immaculate/Black Bear Pictures, Fifty-Fifty Films, and Middle Child Pictures)Excusing her from her usual responsibilities so she can focus only on carrying the so-called miraculous child. But as time goes by, Cecilia starts to suspect that what’s happening may not be divine at all.
Let’s now go through how the ending played out and how Cecilia responded to the events, while also pointing out how it differs from the earlier version of the movie.
Immaculate Ending Explained
Not long after Cecilia settles into the convent, they show her a sacred object they value deeply — a nail believed to be one of the ones used to crucify Jesus Christ. Even though it seems strange for a convent to have such a thing, Cecilia later realizes that it’s been used for something far from holy.
It turns out that Father Sal Tedeschi (Álvaro Morte), who used to be a geneticist, extracted Jesus’ DNA from the nail and began trying to recreate Jesus. The pregnancy Cecilia is carrying is just one in a series of failed attempts to impregnate nuns against their will.
After she attempts to escape and doesn’t succeed, she is kept under guard until the child, referred to as the Messiah, is born. But Cecilia doesn’t plan to stay helpless. She fights back, breaks free from the ropes tying her down, and kills the Mother Superior (Dora Romano) using a cross as a weapon.
Her water breaks shortly after, and she delivers a strong line: “God damn it!” Then she uses rosary beads to strangle the Cardinal to death. Next, Cecilia heads to the laboratory to destroy it and locks Father Sal inside while it burns.
Even though he survives with severe burns, he chases after her down into the catacombs. There, he tries to forcefully cut the child out of her womb, but Cecilia stabs him using the crucifixion nail and escapes from the convent. In one continuous shot, Cecilia delivers the child and bites through the umbilical cord all by herself.
Without wasting time trying to weigh right or wrong, or asking moral questions like “Would you kill baby Hitler?”, she picks up a large rock nearby and smashes it down on the baby as the screen goes black. Yes — she did that.
What did Cecilia give birth to in Immaculate?
Whether Cecilia gave birth to Jesus, the devil, or just a normal child is left for viewers to decide. However, some clues suggest that Father Sal’s goal might have had a twisted outcome. Before everything came to light, Cecilia already doubted she was meant to be some new Virgin Mary.
A divine conception or something far more sinister (Photo: Immaculate/Black Bear Pictures, Fifty-Fifty Films, and Middle Child Pictures)Behind a painting in her room, a message left by someone who came before her quoted a Bible verse: “And no wonder, for Satan himself, masquerades as an angel of light.” Sister Gwen also gave a warning, telling Cecilia that “God has nothing to do with this,” suggesting she already had an idea of the evil present in the convent.
Later, while locked up during her third trimester, Cecilia tells the Mother Superior directly: “This is not God’s work.” We don’t get a close-up look at the child — only a wide shot — but we do hear its unusual breathing.
This could point to a physical deformity from how it was conceived, or it might suggest something more disturbing. It’s up to the viewer to decide just how terrifying the ending is.
Sweeney and the director address the ending
Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, Sweeney said neither she nor director Michael Mohan would ever reveal what the baby truly was. “We have ideas in our head, but we’re never going to discuss it,” she said. She added that they filmed several versions of the final scene.
The one viewers see was actually the very first take they shot. Although they later filmed two more options to give themselves room for editing, their first instinct was to keep the baby’s appearance hidden, and they stayed with that choice.
The version of the ending that existed when Sweeney first auditioned was quite different from what ended up in the film. Mohan told Inverse that the earlier version had Cecilia giving birth, followed by a time jump showing her watching her child play on a playground years later.
But when he brought up the idea of killing the baby, writer Andrew Lobel immediately agreed, saying, “Oh, right, of course, yeah. Let’s smash that baby.”
