Intensity 🩸🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Directed by Arkasha Stevenson.
While there’s a surprising lack of Rottweilers, The First Omen is chock full of reproductive rights, secularism, mental health, religious repression, and a gang of scares — most of them well deserved.
Most importantly, The First Omen is a GREAT horror film that will make even the most hardened horror heart thump.
The First Omen, directed by relative newcomer Arkasha Stevenson, is one of the best-constructed films since Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 Suspira. From the jump, Stevenson perfectly transports the audience to early 1970s Rome.
Replete with paisley, smoking, Morricone-like sounds and the glowing hum of aged lens flairs, the film is a masterful cinematic achievement. Stevenson doesn’t scrimp on set designs, fascinating camera angles, or disturbing costumes. It’s all for us…the audience.
The First Omen is the direct prequel to the near-perfect 1976 film that started it all, the Omen. Just how exactly did Gregory Peck end up with Damien, and why exactly would you decide to adopt a child at 6 p.m. on June 6? All these spooky questions, and a few more, are answered along the way.
A young woman, Margaret (played perfectly by Nell Tiger Free, Servant), arrives in Rome in 1971 to begin her studies as a nun. The nunnery is plainly normal. The nuns are welcoming and pleasant. The children are joyous and engaging — that is except for one. There’s always one.
Margaret is deeply and quizzically drawn to a teen girl, Carlita (Nicole Sorace), with a penchant for horrifying charcoal drawings and biting other children. She quickly discovers that the nunnery’s too-perfect pastiche is soiled with blackened and demonic goings-on.
Much like the original film where Gregory Peck is forced to learn the mischievous ways of the church through clumsy sleuthing and conspiratorial clue gathering, Margaret too, must go on her own unholy quest to crack this devilish plot.
Stevenson, similar to the original director, Richard Donner, slowly metes out the details in a coy way that often points the finger back to Margaret’s potential mental illness at the hands of the Catholic orphanage where she was raised. Just as Gregory Peck was faced with the wild nature of the rise of the Antichrist, Margaret must contend with a wilder and more peculiar truth. It’s the Catholic Church that’s really behind this diabolical scheme.
The film does well to misdirect audiences to several different conclusions, all the while playing its rosaries close to the chest. By leaning into mental illness, the cruelty of the church, and the chaos of early 1970s political unrest in Rome, the First Omen creates a dizzying array of sights, sounds, and satanic surfaces.
Maybe the most incredible offering in the film is Nell Tiger Free‘s performance. She can slowly and methodically move from raw innocence in the film’s early stages, to unbridled horror. It’s a triumph that investigates the entirety of the spectrum of human emotions. While she probably won’t be nominated for an Academy Award, she sure as “hell” should be.
Should you watch the First Omen?
The First Omen is at the core of why you go see horror films. It has all the horror feels. This film fully rivals the original masterwork of the 1976 original. Playing pitch perfect homage to the original film while setting its own course on seas of terror. Pulling from the original source material and creating value-added terror is a real feat. The First Omen replicates several scenes from the original in a way that’s void of the cloying nature of most remakes.
Empathy, complexity, blood-curdling imagery, and truly some of the best horror cinematography in years. The First Omen may end up being the best and most terrifying sight to behold in 2024.