Review: ‘The First Omen’ is the Perfect Downer Until the Very Last Scene
★★★½
Bold, depraved, there is a moment in “The First Omen” so shocking, so grotesque, I had to pick my jaw off the floor. In the scene, a young nun-to-be, Margaret (Nell Tiger Free), while walking down a hallway, stops to watch a pregnant woman giving birth through a window and as she sees the woman scream and shout and dementedly smile like the devil herself, Margaret quickly learns not all childbirths can be described as “miracles.” Now I won’t say what comes out of the womb; the horror is best saved for the movie itself, which gives the audience front row seats to the abomination, but as something begins to crown, whatever it is, I can assure you, is not what is not the beautiful baby the obstetricians were expecting. Watching this scene unfold in the theater, I couldn’t believe what I was witnessing. Seeing it play out in real time, my thoughts leaning to this can’t be happening, no way the filmmakers are going there, holy fuckin’ shit, they are, that this could be in a modern studio film — yes, even an R-rated horror film about rogue Catholics trying to birth the Antichrist — blew my mind. Even if I forget the rest of the film, I will never forget this scene. Having watched a lifetime’s worth of movies has seemingly left me immune to surprises, perhaps jaded even; it is simply hard to color my skin green by something with a 20th Century Studios logo in front of it. My movie-rotted brain thinks it’s seen it all. But I try to say with little hyperbole as possible: this may be the closest I will ever come to experiencing something as surprising, and silencing, as the chestburster scene from “Alien” in my short eternity.
Directed by Arkasha Stevenson, who also co-wrote the script with Tim Smith, “The First Omen” rewinds the “Omen” series back to 1971 and is set right before Gregory Peck adopts a baby boy in secret and names him Damien in Richard Donner’s seminal classic, 1976’s “The Omen.” Like most prequels, you probably know where it goes; how it gets there is a different a story.
As with the opening of Donner’s film, the setting is Rome. The Vizzardelli Orphanage to be precise, where Margaret has traveled to work with orphans and plans to take her vows. Margaret, who has a troubled past and a tendency to see things that may or may not be real, isn’t at her new position long before she starts experiencing hallucinations and encounters some rather odd characters, including: a mysterious girl named Carlita (Nicole Sorace) who draws spooky pictures that aren’t like the other kids’ drawings; an uncanny nun named Sister Anjelica (Ishtar Currie-Wilson) whose eyes cut deep within your very soul; and a disgraced former priest named Father Brennan played by Ralph Ineson, who tries to warn Margaret about some no-good scary things surrounding Carlita. Father Brennan, for the uninitiated, is the same ill-fated priest previously played by Patrick Troughton, who tries to warn Peck’s character in the original “Omen.” Ineson doesn’t play Brennan with the same desperate madness as Troughton, so you’d be forgiven for not making the connection, but the character largely serves the same function nonetheless.
Margaret is also paired with a roommate, Luz, played by Maria Caballero. Though not as doomy and ill-omened as the other characters circling Margaret, Luz is not without her unearthly qualities; this is in part due to her free-spirited personality that runs counter to the lifestyle you would think befits a future nun, but also because Caballero has a godly (or in this case, ungodly) aura that feels both effortlessly retro and out-of-sync with everyone else in the film, or any other film made today, as if she were transported on set directly from some bygone era of cinema. Yet still, it’s her idiosyncrasies that make her untrustworthy. After all, can you really trust a nun who takes you to a disco to get blackout drunk on the night before your shift at the shady Catholic orphanage?
You’ve read the title, you’ve watched the trailer, you know this isn’t “Wide Awake,” so it shouldn’t be a spoiler to say things take a turn for the worse for Margaret after this night. Some of the events that follow happen in traditional “Omen” fashion, some not so much. Yes, “The First Omen” is beheld, sometimes even shackled to its legacy. There is a suicide that mirrors Donner’s “It is all for you!” moment. Jerry Goldsmith’s “Ave Satani” makes a right-on-cue appearance. There is even a photo of Gregory Peck. But kudos should be given to Stevenson and Smith for mostly doing their own thing. The film never feels like a “pre-make” (aka a prequel-remake) and very rarely treads the same waters as the other films in the series. It even branches from the established path and sets up the possibility for the story to continue either concurrently, after or in lieu of the original trilogy, though this may be birthed out of the studio’s desire to spark another lucrative franchise from a pre-established IP and not to tell the best story possible, of which the filmmakers mostly succeed despite what the studio may or may not want with this franchise.
For a modern studio reboot, and the sixth film in the series, “The First Omen” is beautifully crafted. Aaron Morton’s cinematography is particularly elegant at times; I especially love the shot where Margaret is framed between two rows of candles as though she is caught in teeth. And there’s also the moment where the film cuts from a close up of a spider to a medium shot of her head as she wakes from her blackout disco date, her dark hair spread out like a web.
Of course, to see a modern film with dark scenes that are well-lit and easy to see is also worth celebrating.
It is either twisted fate or some kind of bizarre blessing that “The First Omen” has been released mere weeks after “Immaculate,” another pregnancy-themed Catholic horror similar in both plot and, in my opinion, quality. Both films are fantastic and for what is surely all too brief of a time, are available to watch in the same theater at the same time. While you can, I recommend a trip to your local multiplex to watch these movies back-to-back, if only to see how two films can have virtually identical stories but still manage to be completely different experiences. I’ll spare you the details on how these two films dance with each other as there’s bound to be many essays on the subject in the coming months.
What I do want to highlight here, however, is where these films place their most horrific moments and the impact this has on the overall experience. Stevenson and Smith stage their show-stopping shocker near the middle of “The First Omen”; as a result, the scene burns into your cranium and haunts you the rest of the film. Meanwhile, the director of “Immaculate,” Michael Mohan, and his writer, Andrew Lobel, save theirs for the very end. This means you sit in silence, as the credits roll and you leave the theater, go home and lie in bed, the whole time your mind churning and stewing on the desperation, the anger, the conflicted thoughts and raw emotional power you just experienced, feeling the world is a cruel, dark place.
If you ask me which film I like better, I would say I prefer “The First Omen.” In many ways, it is superior; the way the story unfolds, the cinematography, the score by Mark Korven, it has a visceral power it never relinquishes, at least not until the very end. “The First Omen” constantly dials it to 11 whereas “Immaculate,” for the better part of its runtime, keeps it at a 7, but the climax is where the former offers you a hand back up and the latter kicks you while you’re down. And while, in theory, Stevenson has the more shocking scene because hers doesn’t hold back — teases you even, makes you think she will cut around the horror, that she won’t show you, and then she really shows you — Mohan’s has more power because he holds back and makes you imagine what the screen isn’t showing you all the while forcing you to stare at Sydney Sweeney as her unrestrained performance makes you believe what you’re not seeing is really awful. Not only does the placement work in Mohan’s favor, leaving the audience with a bitter, putrid aftertaste that is ideal to these kind of movies, I’d also argue its tone is more fitting to the “Omen” franchise.
Perhaps the “Omen” trilogy’s greatest tradition is a sudden, tragic ending that doesn’t try to have it both ways. Hope is not synonymous with “The Omen.” Even “The Final Conflict,” which has, erm, I guess you could call it the “happiest” ending of the bunch, leaves you with a trail of dead babies and children right up to the very end. “The First Omen,” for the most part, follows that tradition; it permeates a sense of hopelessness throughout the majority of its runtime, but cops out in the final scene leaving you with some sense of hope that is lukewarm at best. In any other franchise, this wouldn’t be a happy ending; for “The Omen” though, any kind of hope is a happy ending. Am I being pedantic? Sure. But right up until the ending, a final tag that in retrospect seems tacked on, mandated by the studio perhaps, “The First Omen” is the type of film that aims to leave a sour taste in your mouth; sweet and sour has no place here. In that regard, “Immaculate” has the upper hand, its ending is pure sour. But it’s also not a major studio film. “The First Omen” is, and I suppose like the many characters in this franchise who stand up to defeat Damien only to succumb to his power, so too will this franchise succumb to the studio machine. So, in this respect, while I can’t say the same about the cursed childbirth I mention in the first paragraph, this film is a miracle.
