THE FIRST OMEN - Mark Reviews Movies

The First Omen, 20th Century Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 4, 2024

An origin story of the Antichrist from 1976's The Omen is an inherently unnecessary endeavor. In fact, those who recall that most memorable of revelations about the birth of the demonic Damien from the original film might wonder if this prequel is something like a nature documentary. It's not, of course, because that would be both a silly and an accurate approach, and The First Omen only wants to believe this is dreadfully serious material.

In the hands of co-writer/director Arkasha Stevenson, it's very much that. Until the story arrives at the inevitable and it becomes apparent that none of the screenwriters figured out how to reconcile the back story of the '76 film with the specifics of this one, the movie more or less accomplishes that goal, too. This is an atmospheric horror story about some increasingly odd and deadly things going on at a Catholic orphanage, and the mood of gloom and doom is so persistent that it almost doesn't matter that everything about the tale amounts to a preordained conclusion.

The main story takes place in Rome in 1971 (which definitively sets the timeline of the original three theatrical movies and makes them quite confusing, although nobody's going to sleep over the two sequels under any circumstances). Before that, we meet two priests speaking in riddles and insinuations about how the mother of a planned Antichrist was conceived.

The priests are played by Ralph Ineson, an actor who was born for horror movies, and Charles Dance, an actor who can spend half his brief screentime in shadow and still make a significant impact. Ineson plays Father Brennan, a name that will be familiar to those who recall the original film, and the name of Dance's priest is irrelevant.

He's here for the story's first death, after all, and while the priest isn't technically dead by the end of the prologue, one has to imagine a sudden stop or a perpetual state to the eerie, bloody smile he offers. The whole scene is incredibly effective, not only in the juxtaposition of half-spoken exposition and haunting imagery filling in the gaps, but also in how the big moment echoes a sight that's the last one Brennan will see in a few years in the series' chronology.

The main plot follows Margaret (Nell Tiger Free), a novitiate from the United States who has come to Italy by invitation from Cardinal Lawrence (Bill Nighy), who was the priest at the orphanage where Margaret was raised. Before becoming a nun, Margaret will teach at the orphanage's school. There, she meets Carlita (Nicole Sorace), a teenage girl whom the nuns see as a troublemaker and lock up to keep her away from the other children.

The plot isn't much, obviously, and much of it is the suggestion that there's something very, very wrong with Carlita, beyond being rebellious against authority and picking fights with other kids. After all, the priests in the opening scene know the to-be mother of the Antichrist is a teenager now, and this teen girl seems to the fit the bill perfectly. The actual truth of what's happening here is meant to be a surprise, but it's simply not. Without the characters having too much to do, the focus of the story and various parallels being mentioned over and over again give away the game before the story acknowledges it's playing one.

Like the other priest's name, this is mostly irrelevant to the aims and, for a while, broad success of the movie. Those goals are to create an unsettling and sometimes disorienting atmosphere, generate plenty of mystery surrounding something we know is going to happen and basically know how it will, and toy with the notion of theme-and-variation with its predecessors—mainly the first film.

In terms of the last thing, that basically means giving us a string of unnatural deaths. That first one provides a sense of the familiar being slightly subverted. The others are similar, such as a woman standing on an upper level of a building, proclaiming that it's all for someone below, and adding a step to the recognizable proceedings before taking a final step. Another involves a truck, but there's a lot more severed than just a head by the end of it.

These only work because Stevenson builds to them—not in some specific step-by-step account of the deaths, but in enveloping the material in a constant sese of unease. Even the jump-scares here are of the genuine sort, in that there's little to no warning by way of shot composition, editing, or the soundtrack. It's almost as if the filmmaker knows the big pieces of this story are a given, so she compensates by offering little surprises along the way. It's a smart tactic.

Eventually, the script (by Stevenson, Tim Smith, and Keith Thomas) gets to the inevitable, and while it's still staged and shot with the same degree of creepiness, there's no avoiding that The First Omen just starts going through the predictable motions. If this is an intrinsically extraneous affair, the third act seems to go out of its way to remind us of that, giving us an unholy birth and two repetitive epilogues that tie this tale directly to the '76 film. It even denies us the payoff of what we know about Damien's mother from the original, because that, apparently, is for yet another sequel.

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