There’s an awful lot of screaming (maybe too much) in director/co-writer Arkasha Stevenson’s prequel workThe First Omen—and perhaps the mythology is overly twisty and complicated so it can line up exactly with the 1976 original film The Omen, but The First Omen marks an extraordinary debut work. Stevenson is not only a terrific filmmaker (and director of such TV series as Legion and Brand New Cherry Flavor) but one who has clearly studied what makes certain horror films simply scary, while others crawl deep under our skin to give us the worst kind of dreams. Perhaps borrowing more from Rosemary’s Baby than The Omen, the film allows for a few nods to the original but gives us a story that is weirdly similar to the recent Immaculate but with a deeper distrust and more insightful fear of church rituals and motivations, even going so far as to say that the offspring of Satan walking the earth wasn’t Satan’s or a Satanist’s idea at all.
The film begins with a warning from Father Harris (a brief appearance by Charles Dance) to Father Brennan (Ralph Ineson) that something is coming, a female child who is marked by the Devil and will eventually give birth to a male child that will be the official son of Satan. Then we jump ahead an unknown number of years to meet Margaret (Nell Tiger Free, Game of Thrones), a young American woman sent to Rome as a novitiate and to begin her life of service to the church. She grew up in an orphanage and was under the watchful eye of a man who is now Cardinal Lawrence (Bill Nighy), who greets her at the convent where she will finalize her training and eventually take her vows. Margaret has led a fairly sheltered life, but another novitiate, Luz (Maria Caballero) decides the two of them need to live it up a bit before shutting themselves off forever from men and alcohol, so they go clubbing dressed decidedly not like nuns.
But much like Sydney Sweeney in Immaculate, everywhere Margaret goes, she sees signs that something is following her or haunting her or terrorizing her dreams. She finds a kindred spirit in Carlita (Nicole Sorace), a young girl at the orphanage who many of the nuns and other children believe is evil and is often put in solitary confinement (or “the bad room”) after she acts out. It’s clear we’re meant to think that Carlita is the character destined to birth evil incarnate, which probably means she isn’t. And the rest of the film is a combination of conspiracy theories, religious treachery, and mystical happenings carried out at every level of the church.
Particularly effective in The First Omen is the great Sonia Braga as Sister Silva, the head nun, who seems utterly convinced that they are doing no wrong in the way they raise or discipline these children. Eventually, an excommunicated Father Brennan returns, this time to contact Margaret and get her to steal medical records from the convent, which has a birthing room where young, unmarried women are able to give birth in secret and leave their babies at the orphanage. The entire facility is a blend of Gothic tombs and medical facilities that almost demand that body horror happens within them. Attempting to decipher the medical records is actually a great deal of fun (except for the photos of deformed babies), and Margaret and Brennan look at each file to determine who at the convent is the child they are looking for, presumably with a hidden “666” somewhere on their body.
With impressive skill, The First Omen leaves us on the doorstep of director Richard Donner’s The Omenwithout overplaying the nostalgia card, and the biggest reason the film works is the performance of Nell Tiger Free, whose combination of naivety, curiosity, and terror work in perfect balance to give us a fully formed horror-movie character. Frankly I was stunned to find such a performance in a film that could have easily been familiar needle-drop moments, ripped off from the original movie. It works as both a solid, R-rated, ultra-gory horror film and a criticism of religious fervor gone terribly wrong. And it even gives itself an outlet where a sequel of sorts isn’t out of the question.
The film is now playing in theaters.
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