The First Omen (2024)

Watched 4/15/24 (theater)

The first time I saw Richard Donner’s 1976 classic, I found more to be pleased with than frustrated with. The second time I saw it, I realized that its campy charm and tomb-raiding sidequests were more knowingly fun than I had given it credit for the first time. Writing about that movie afterward allowed me to decide that it’s an extremely suspenseful, fun, and rewatchable string of blatantly overdramatic set pieces with excellent punchlines. It finds so many moments to punctuate the creepy little boy’s evil that you can’t help but laugh as the holy shit himself terrorizes this at-first unsuspecting and finally vindictive, cutthroat family. It’s an effective piece of studio flair that has eyecatching moments to spare, and any pacing flaws are easily forgiven underneath the weight of its iconic sequences.

Enter Arkasha Stevenson’s 2024 return to Damien, this time set in a shot-on-location period Rome. I was fully prepared to take the trip as movies shot on location in Europe automatically gain the ability to punch above whatever weight class the rest of their ingredients are being baked at. And some of those ingredients were as tasty as the city itself. A spicy, layered lead performance from Nell Tiger Free, an actress that I learned is not just a kick-ass name. With her character Margaret, she’s asked to slowly lose her mind over two hours—and is up to the task. Ralph Ineson and his voice from Hell are essential if underused side-dish tone-setters for exposition, working hard to ensure what’s onscreen isn’t as drab as I am sure it was on the page. And Stevenson’s steady direction serves as head chef in elevating just enough a story that sorely suffers from prequelitis.

Unfortunately, its script never allowed for me to become invested. Much like this year’s earlier nunsploitation 2.5-star classic, Immaculate, I found The First Omen to be an interesting setting with on-point performances in search of better writing and overall structure. Tiger Free’s Margaret is a newly-appointed expat nun/caretaker at the convent in Rome, arriving with more emotional baggage than physical. There have been plenty of think pieces written by better writers than I about the overabundance of recent films featuring the trauma storyline, and I fell into that criticism here with the tri-writer story filling in one scene after another with details exposing Margaraet’s checkered past. Anything that kills a movie’s vibe more than the Antichrist should, in my opinion, be reworked, and I wished throughout that we could have done away with this tacked-on narrative in favor of richer side characters.

We get early promise of a rogue, sexually-free, pre-vow nun friend, and I was much more invested in the story when those beats were hitting. As we devolved into that character getting lobotomized off-screen and Margaret’s only other friends becoming an all-but-mute young-girl trauma pal and the aforementioned, underused Ineson, a bit of boredom began setting in, with the pacing slowly but surely begin to fail its seemingly-exciting prerogative of a crazed religious horror fable. There was not a stretch or scene in this movie that bothered me, it all just lingered with a bit too stately of an acceleration. 

And then there’s the prequel part of it. Knowing what must be coming is always frustrating and is why I choose to be an outspoken opposer of the prequel format. Especially when you invite comparison to the original’s jazzily sadistic kill scenes, the horrors of this prequel just didn’t quite get there for me, despite the game central performance. While elements like lighting and location were noticeably always on point, I struggled to see the need for a less-absurd but this time CG-pyrotechnic rehash of the hung nanny bit and a bisection car crash later that could have used a bit more pomp and circumstance to be truly memorable. 

The last act, while picking up the momentum, continued the lack of character or humor and instead cranked up to a climax that fully ran its franchise engine to get to the birth that would spawn the Donner original. While suitably grimy and violent, it can’t help but feel a bit clumsy when the lead survives certain death with a meaningless twin baby and completely unlikeable side character, only to be visited by a fan-service-laden Ineson in a bracingly strange, tacked-on epilogue. I could have used 20% more fun and another 20% more cohesiveness throughout, as the set pieces failed to inject energy in between the flaccid drama scenes.

I wish that I had liked this more and I am very curious to see what Stevenson can do as a director when untethered to such a franchise-dependent story, but couldn’t quite find my sweet spot in this perfectly serviceable but mildly monotonous picture. Seems like I am in the minority here of not liking this, but I think I can speak for almost everyone when I say I will certainly watch whatever this director does next.

5/10