Sister Acts

My thoughts on The First Omen

If you had asked me at the beginning of the year to peg what I thought would be the big cinematic trends of 2024, I probably would not have volunteered “studio-level nunsploitation involving wide-eyed and salon-perfect orphan novitiates arriving in Italy to take their final vows and becoming involved in twisted tales of unhinged obstetrics and wild conspiracies involving the Catholic Church” as my first guess. And yet, only a couple of weeks after the release of the Sydney Sweeney hit Immaculate, now comes The First Omen, which hits those same beats and, as you can probably surmise from the title, also serves as the prequel to the 1976 horror hit. Also like Immaculate, the film as a whole is pretty much junk from the get-go, though not entirely without interest for those with a taste for such things.

For those somehow unfamiliar with it, The Omen was a bit of silliness from 1976 in which a rich and powerful American diplomat becomes increasingly certain that his five-year-old son, Damien—actually an orphan that he surreptitiously accepted when his actual child died at birth—was actually was the Antichrist reborn as those around him began dying off in mysterious and spectacular gory ways. Combing exploitation silliness with studio slickness (which afforded it both the presence of big stars like Gregory Peck and Lee Remick and an effects budget large enough to pull the gruesome set pieces that were at its heart), the film was dumb as can be but touched enough of a chord with audiences to become one of the biggest hits of that year, going on to spawn three sequels—Damien: Omen II (1978), The Final Conflict (1981) and the made-for-TV Omen IV: The Awakening (1991)—and a 2006 remake with Liev Schreiber and Julia Stiles that I suspect you may have forgotten about entirely before reading these words. None of these subsequent films, I should add, were particularly good either, though I suppose I have a slight fondness for The Final Conflict, in which little Damien grew to adulthood in the form of Sam Neill (in a performance that comes across as even stranger if you saw him in the truly demented Possession (1981), which he shot at roughly the same time).

Now comes The First Omen, which has been designed to expand our knowledge of how that demonic imp ended up with the ambassador in the first place. Set in 1971, it begins with Margaret (Nell Tiger Free) arriving in Rome, currently teeming with unrest from student protests, to take her final vows and work at an orphanage led the harsh Sister Silva and the seemingly more benign Cardinal Lawrence (Bill Nighy, whose spectral presence all but ensures that his character just might turn out to have a dark side). Upon her arrival, she meets one of the orphans, Carlita (Nicole Sorace), whose troubled nature lands her a perpetual booking in the orphanage’s “bad room,” and, having had her share of issues when she was younger, tries to take her under her wing. Turns out that the two have more in common than that and, inspired by a meeting with  one Father Brennan (Ralph Ineson)—a character that would undergo one of the more spectacular deaths in the original film—Margaret digs deeper into the increasingly weird goings-on (including wild hallucinations and bizarre deaths) and uncovers a church-based conspiracy so jaw-dropping that it makes Monsignor seem like The Bells of St. Marys by comparison.

The First Omen suffers from two unavoidable problems. The first is that it is an Omen movie and therefore offers up yet another rehash of Satanic gibberish that wasn’t particular scary the first time around and which lacks the novelty of the slick sheen and star power that helped make the first one such a hit. The second is that it is a prequel, meaning that the narrative has to unfold in a way that lines up with the already-known story elements, thereby cutting down on any suspense regarding what might unfold. In fact, the least interesting aspects of the film are the ones that connect most directly to the original film, including specific homages to that ones most infamous bits. As for the rest of the screenplay concocted by Tim Smith and Arkasha Stevenson (the latter also serving as director), it is hard to judge how effective it might have been once upon a time because once you remove all the Omen-specific material from the narrative, what is left hews so closely to the basic plotting of Immaculate that you have to wonder what the distributors could have been thinking when they chose to open just a couple of weeks later instead of waiting a few months and letting memories of its predecessor fade away.

If I had to pick between the two, I would probably go with Immaculate, largely for the reasonably convincing performance by Sydney Sweeney (by comparison, the wonderfully-named Nell Tiger Free seems possessed more by the spirit of Eva Green than the Lord) and the way that, after 70-odd minutes of tedium, it suddenly perked up in the final reels before arriving at a genuinely wild finale. However, to give The First Omen credit, it contains more moments of weirdness along the lines of the Immaculate climax that gives it a sense of energy lacking in its predecessor. Some of them are inevitably of a grisly nature—most notably a birth scene that is certain to be the most talked-about moment—and some are just odd, including a moment where a tarted-up Margaret (don’t ask) is doing shots in a disco with some guy while trading impressions of Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl. The film never quite goes as far as it thinks it does—it pales in comparison, for example, to the infamous Amityville II: The Possession (1982), a film so deranged in so many ways that when the demons finally arrived, they actually seemed mild in comparison to the other ingredients in that seedy stew—but it does have a certain gnarliness to it at times that cannot be entirely denied.

Make no mistake, The First Omen is a nonsensical piece of demonic dopiness that I cannot in good conscience recommend to anyone. That said, it is a little more watchable than one might rightfully expect from a prequel to a series of films that were never particularly good to begin with and which have not exactly stood the test of time. However, if you did happen to see Immaculate already, you might want to save this one for a little while so that it will seem a little fresher to you—otherwise, the sense of deja vu you will feel will prove to be more frightening than anything on the screen.