The ultimate problem child, Damien, has been given more reboots and TV show revivals than any troublemaking minor deserves. It’s not really a surprise, though. Still-terrifying 1976 horror The Omen is one of the classics of the genre, and admittedly the only movie that truly freaks me out. I won’t watch it again, thank you very much. And I’ve largely avoided the slew of other horror rebirths from that era (Halloween, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Exorcist) because they just seem like diminishing returns. But The First Omen makes a case for its existence with skin-crawling visuals that rival the original, and a sortof weird sisterly bond with the similarly Hellish Immaculate, which parallel one another’s stories of beautiful, troubled American women who arrive in Italy to join the sisterhood, only to realize it’s closer to a nightmare cult.
First announced in 2016 with Antonio Campos (Christine, The Devil All the Time) as director, The First Omen arrives eight years later with Arkasha Stevenson making her directorial debut. Campos is a fantastic filmmaker but Stevenson offers striking, artful direction of her own, and having a female perspective on this distinctly feminine tale of the worst kind of pregnancy anxiety. It doesn’t get much more worrying than carrying the Antichrist, does it?
Servant breakout Nell Tiger Free plays Margaret, the saintly American girl who arrives at Rome’s Vizzardeli Orphanage to take her vows and become a nun. It can’t be stressed how close to Immaculate these opening sequences are. There’s even a gorgeous, rebellious best friend, Luz (Maria Caballero), who dresses provocatively and encourages Margaret to get out and enjoy her brief time of freedom…at the nightclub, where she’s promptly swapping spit with some dude, drinking too much, and hitting the dancefloor. The orphanage is full old nuns with mean faces etched by time (Sonia Braga plays the most fervent of them all), while Bill Nighy is Cardinal Lawrence, who has been so helpful to Margaret that we know instantly not to trust him.
Since the film is set in 1971, we also get the return of that crazy Father Brennan, played now by Ralph Ineson. He’s just as radical as ever, and 100% impalement free so that’s an improvement. The film cleverly teases his grisly fate with the unholy crashing of a stained-glass window and steel pipes, captured in slow motion and glistening like God was shining down upon this tragedy himself.
Margaret soon sees a lot of herself in the ostracized, child-like teen Carlita Skianna (Nicole Serace), who is also having disturbing visions of something dark and twisted. The two become close, only for the school to become a house of carnage as deaths start to pile up, and the blood-curdling manifestations become relentless. Stevenson refuses to spare us even a little bit as she delves into grotesque body horror, captured in an unforgettable birth sequence that would make David Cronenberg cower in the corner and cry like a baby. Similar to Immaculate’s buzzy finale, The First Omen has multiple scenes of stark barbarity that will have horror fans quaking in their seats. Personally, I haven’t had a movie keep me so uncomfortable and off-balance in a long time.
Similar to her performance in Servant, Nell Tiger Free initially strikes the image of a blank slate. She can be anything and everything at a moment’s notice, beginning as naive and virginal, and later wracked with paranoia and righteous fury as her devout beliefs are exploited. It’s a role that demands she be our lens into the unfathomable. As quiet and finely-tuned as Free is early on is how big and expressive she must as the shit really hits the fan.
Some slight retconning to fit with the original movie (thankfully, we don’t even have to think about that dreadful fourth movie) and an overlong runtime will be jarring to franchise die-hards, but The First Omen doesn’t push hard to upset the status quo. It’s set during a time when there’s a rise in secularism, which has caused desperation within the Church and driven it to extreme religious fanaticism. It’s this hardcore fundamentalism that proves to be as deadly as any Satanic panic. Arriving as more people are claiming spirituality over organized religion, The First Omen could find a welcome audience in those who don’t mind seeing Catholicism degraded in the way this movie does with relish. I’m not sure it could stand on its own two feet without The Omen lore backing it up, but then it doesn’t need to and leaves you curious where the Devil will rear his ugly head next.
The First Omen opens in theaters on April 5th.
