I’m not always the biggest fan of horror films. For me, horror only works two ways: extraordinarily effective or utterly hilarious. I’m not really the best person to see these films in the theater because I will crack up like it’s a slapstick comedy, rubbing many others in the audience the wrong way. I’ve gotten a ton of evil looks in many theaters. With all that, I went and saw The First Omen anyway. Another franchise restarter but not a reboot like the 2006 The Omen remake, this film is a prequel adding to the original film from 1976 that also tries to leave itself open to continue from this point without erasing or maybe even affecting the other Omen films that came out after the original. So The First Omen follows Margaret Daino (Nell Tiger Free), a young woman who’s in the process of becoming a nun and goes to Rome to work at an orphanage before she takes the veil. She, an orphan, is very excited to see her mentor Cardinal Lawrence (Bill Nighy) again. Here, she’s exploring Rome but taking an interest in a girl named Carlita (Nicole Sorace), who’s having a hard time there and kept away from the other girls there. After being approached by Father Brennan (Ralph Ineson), Margaret takes a similar path to Robert Thorn before diverting greatly to lead into that original film.
This might be a spoiler, but I think it should be pretty apparent that this film is about the mother of Damian’s birth, which we don’t see in the original film. This film does pretty well at capturing the feeling of a horror film of the 70s. Arkasha Stevenson, making their feature film debut directing, shines for me in how it uses light and shadow on the screen to control the mood and your eye to really control what you focus on and what you see. The film, at times, is really good at giving you very uncomfortable scenes and sequences. Aaron Morton, the cinematographer, also deserves credit for how this film looks. The shots in Rome give you the feel of European warmth from films from that era. The use of film grain, either from using film stock or adding it in post, also helps with this. The other thing that really stands out in this film is the sound. The use of sound will have your skin crawling with just how good it sounds in certain parts that I don’t want to spoil, but I couldn’t even look at, and the sound of it had me like, “Oh hell naw.”
The film has more body horror in it and subtle changes to the reasoning behind the conspiracy to bring about the Anti-Christ. (Sorry if I’m spoiling an almost 50-year-old film this one is connected to) This film is working through some ideas about issues affecting women and body autonomy in the United States. The film places things more on institutions and their need to stay in power and control and their willingness to do anything – even the most evil things to control people and reassert that over the masses if more progressive ideas to improve society draw the people away from their influence. While you can see it just as “The Church,” you can see the parallels with government and its use of religion as well. It’s not a simple plot of Satanists must bring about the Anti-Christ to have Evil win. The people here have a more complex idea of what they want and why. Margaret’s fight to save Carlita and later own herself mirrors, at times for me, situations happening here in the States concerning abortion rights. This film is very much about a woman’s right to their body, just using a literal devil involved. There’s more that is worth watching again to formulate, but I liked this more than I thought, even while laughing through half of it. The First Omen is a good franchise restarter that should make horror and Omen fans happy.
Score: B
RIOTUS 