The First Omen Review: Deftly Directed Horror, With A Tired Aesthetic.
The first Omen, and by that I mean the original 1976 horror film, has always fascinated me. It is an interesting play on the story of Abraham and Isaac, only in this retelling, the father is driven to try to kill his own son to prevent the ascension of the anti-Christ. It’s pretty good meat for a horror film, but what always impresses with The Omen is its restraint; most of its scares and horrors are due to it having a powerful atmosphere, and a sense of dread that, like The Exorcist, stays with you after you watch the film.
This new prequel has been a long time coming. It has the same atmosphere and sense of dread, but I would say it plays a bit cheaply for them. You see this film is set in a convent, and so naturally, it can play on our fears of Religion, nuns especially, and it can be as transgressive and shocking as it likes.
It follows Margaret, a young woman who is soon to take the veil. Though you wouldn’t know it with how easily she is persuaded to go out on the town drinking and partying. This in itself is not a problem. I found myself wondering at her choices throughout the first half of the film, but we soon find out that she is not what she seems.
Or at least, the film does a pretty decent job of hiding it’s main twists for the first two acts of the movie. And when they are revealed, all will make sense, kind of.
The use of red herrings keeps us guessing at what's really going on, and one of the reveals, that there are in fact two churches, one that seeks power and the other that follows Christ, is ham-fisted, but won’t need much extrapolation to persuade a secular audience.
After all we’re here for the horror right?
In that regard, Arkasha Stevenson delivers quite an unsettling movie, with some genuinely creepy visuals that will stay with you long after watching the film. I think the fact she recreated the infamous “it’s all for you” scene was pretty unnecessary, but in the age of reboots where everything is like poetry and rhymes, I won’t begrudge this.
Genuinely though, I did find some of the film unsettling; kind of like how Parkor Finn’s Smile delivered so much on the scare front, I certainly find it refreshing in the age of “post-horror” to see horror films that are unafraid to use genuine jump scares, in the very same way I am marvelled to find action films unafraid to use explosions. We need to stop looking at genre films and expecting them to somehow not play to the strengths of the medium.
I found many of the visuals, and the way these play into Margaret's deteriorating mental state very well done, and Stevenson is a director to watch in horror on the strength of what she does here.
And yet… just like so many films centred around Christianity and specifically the theology of the devil; what we get here is a kind of vile and transgressively charged movie, that drapes itself in the aesthetics of Christianity, which in themselves unsettle viewers these days.
There’s not a lot of substance here. Which is both a strength and a weakness of the film. In particular, the students rioting outside the orphanage in favour of Marxist ideals are merely there to illustrate the declining power of the church. But its not central to the film other than that.
Likewise, the search for the hidden google chrome logo on the innocents head has been done to death in these films, yet it always seems to come about in a shocking way, and though it does so here in a novel way; it does feel inserted into the film to riff on the classic scene from 1976.
The movie also feels like it’s been cut to bits in places, even though it’s quite long. None of this spoils the enjoyment. In particular, I think Nell Tiger Free was excellent in her performance as Margaret. She is a great lead with a genuine dilemma to deal with, something we haven’t seen since the original film.
But there might have been a little more room for the forces of good to break through here and there. Ralph Ineson as Father Brennen doesn’t quite cut it. His rantings and ravings in 1976 made him unsympathetic in that film, and it’s the same here.
The First Omen is at pains to illustrate that the real villain of the piece is the Church itself, no matter how much it tries to dissuade us with that line about “actual followers of Christ.” In that sense it’s quite a safe movie.
Modern audiences will find much in the first Omen that resonates with them. Like House of the dragon, it will play on their terror of pregnancy and at times makes an exploitation flick of it. It will correlate with their views of the Church as an evil cult who exist only for power. They will be pleased there’s not a hint of goodness throughout, even though the supernatural powers of the devil are on full display. And they will probably nod as unwanted baby Damien gets born into a life of privilege, that being retroactively the main evil of the Omen films. Not the devil. But I suppose for a film called The First Omen In 2024, I wouldn’t really have been expecting any more than that.
At least it was scary.
