Immaculate has now been unleashed on digital platforms in the US, allowing a whole new audience to experience its shocking ending.
The horror movie stars Sydney Sweeney as Sister Cecilia, who, shortly after she arrives at a remote Italian convent, discovers that she is pregnant. Cardinal Franco Merola (Giorgio Colangeli) treats it as a new Immaculate Conception, heralding the Second Coming of Jesus.
Cecilia starts to be treated like royalty at the convent, freed of her duties to only care for her miraculous unborn child. But it doesn't take long for Cecilia to realise that it might not be all that holy an event.
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So let's dig into the shocking ending of Immaculate to explain just what happened to Cecilia and what she decided to do about it, as well as how different it was to the original ending.
Immaculate ending explained
Shortly after Cecilia arrives at the convent, she's shown its most treasured possession: a nail said to have been used for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
A totally normal thing for a convent to have, but Cecilia later discovers it has been used in an unexpected way. Father Sal Tedeschi (Álvaro Morte) used to be a geneticist and he has extracted the DNA of Jesus from the nail, using it to create a new Jesus.
Cecilia's pregnancy is the latest attempt of many failed attempts to successfully impregnate a nun against her will. After a failed escape, Cecilia is kept prisoner until she gives birth to the new Messiah, supposedly.
She has other ideas though and breaks free from her restraints, beating the Mother Superior (Dora Romano) to death with a cross. Her waters break soon after (leading to an exceptionally delivered "God damn it"), but Cecilia manages to strangle the Cardinal to death with a string of rosary beads.
Watch Immaculate on Prime Video in the US
Cecilia then goes to burn down the lab, trapping Father Sal in there. He breaks free, though horribly burned, and tracks Cecilia down into the catacombs. As he forcefully tries to cut the potential new Jesus out of her, she stabs him with the crucifixion nail and finally gets out of the convent grounds.
In an incredible one-shot, Cecilia then gives birth to the baby and bites through the umbilical cord herself.
Without a second for a moral debate, like, 'Would you kill baby Hitler?', Cecilia grabs the biggest rock she can find nearby and smashes it down on the baby as Immaculate cuts to black.
Yep, she really did that.
What did Cecilia give birth to in Immaculate?
Did Cecilia kill the new Jesus, the new Satan or just a normal baby? It's left to you to decide, but there are hints throughout that Father Sal's plan might not have the holy outcome he would have wanted.
Even before the big discovery about what happened to her, Cecilia was already sceptical that she was the new Virgin Mary. Behind a painting in her room, a previous victim had written a verse from the Bible: "And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light."
Sister Gwen also warns Cecilia that "God has nothing to do with this", a hint that she already knew the darkness of what was happening at the convent. And when Cecilia is imprisoned in her third trimester, she tells the Mother Superior: "This is not God's work."
We don't see the baby except from in a wide shot, but we do hear its ragged breathing, which could simply be down to a deformity due to its conception, or a sign of evil. But really, it's left to you to decide just how dark the Immaculate ending is.
Talking to EW, Sweeney revealed that neither she nor director Michael Mohan will conclusively say exactly what the baby was. "We have ideas in our head, but we're never going to discuss it," she teased.
"We shot it multiple ways. What you see is actually the first take that we shot, and then we did two more that covered our bases in case we wanted to show different angles, but our instinct was always to never show it, and so we went with our first take."
The original ending to Immaculate when Sweeney first auditioned was also very different to what ended up on the screen.
"It was a very conservative ending where she gives birth to the baby and then there's a time cut to years later and she's sitting on the playground watching her child play," Mohan told Inverse.
"When I said we needed to murder the baby [writer Andrew Lobel] was just like, 'Oh, right, of course, yeah. Let's smash that baby'."
Well, quite.
Immaculate is out now in cinemas and is also available to buy or rent in the US from Prime Video, iTunes and more.
Movies Editor, Digital Spy Ian has more than 10 years of movies journalism experience as a writer and editor. Starting out as an intern at trade bible Screen International, he was promoted to report and analyse UK box-office results, as well as carving his own niche with horror movies, attending genre festivals around the world. After moving to Digital Spy, initially as a TV writer, he was nominated for New Digital Talent of the Year at the PPA Digital Awards. He became Movies Editor in 2019, in which role he has interviewed 100s of stars, including Chris Hemsworth, Florence Pugh, Keanu Reeves, Idris Elba and Olivia Colman, become a human encyclopedia for Marvel and appeared as an expert guest on BBC News and on-stage at MCM Comic-Con. Where he can, he continues to push his horror agenda – whether his editor likes it or not.
