"Immaculate" (2024) and "The Boys from Brazil" (1978)

Immaculate (2024) is a laughable film in many ways. Its horror relies on shock rather than substance. Still, it brushes against questions that are worth considering. The story imagines a scheme to recreate Christ through genetic material drawn from the cross. The idea is that if His DNA could be cloned, then His power could be reawakened. This new Christ-figure would usher in apocalyptic events and offer a different kind of Christianity, one more concerned with worldly power.

A week before watching Immaculate, I revisited The Boys from Brazil (1978). That film is more compelling, though built on a similar concept. The Nazis try to create a new Hitler by cloning him and recreating the circumstances of his upbringing. Rather than invoking the supernatural, the movie leans entirely on materialistic assumptions: DNA plus environment will equal destiny.

Both films are flawed in the same way. They assume that people can be reduced to physical components. Immaculate thinks power comes from a body with the right genetic code. The Boys from Brazil thinks evil can be rebuilt by reproducing chromosomes and childhood traumas. But both miss the deeper truth: people are not machines.

A Christian worldview insists that humans are embodied souls. We are not merely biology or environment. Scripture teaches that we are created in God’s image and uniquely knit together by Him. Even identical twins who share DNA and environment to a large degree are not the same person. They do not share a soul. If human cloning were ever achieved, the result would not be a copy of the original person. It would be a new individual, with their own body, mind, and eternal soul.

This is why the premise of Immaculate collapses. Christ’s saving power does not rest in His DNA. His humanity was real and complete, but the heart of His mission was not genetic. The power of the cross is that the eternal Son of God gave His life as a sacrifice for sin and rose again. That is not something a lab can reproduce.

The Boys from Brazil is at least consistent within its materialism. But even there, the story shows cracks. History has only one Hitler, because souls are not mass-produced. Evil is real, but it is not reducible to biology. It is a corruption of the will, a twisting of what God made good.

Both films reveal the poverty of materialism. They imagine cloning as a way to replicate destiny or divinity. But the Christian faith teaches that life is more than molecules. Souls matter. And salvation is not in DNA but in the living Christ, once crucified and forever risen.