The First Omen

Twin movies are one thing, but Immaculate and The First Omen coming out mere weeks apart is downright eerie.

Both begin with a haunting prologue which sets the tone. The main story of both feature a young American woman traveling to Rome in order to join a convent, having been devoutly religious for just about her entire life, never engaging in any vices. She encounters severe, older nuns who scowl disapprovingly and suspiciously at her as soon as she arrives, and her mentor is a priest who seems kinder and more understanding than anyone else. She befriends a fellow new nun who’s much more adventurous and scandalous than herself. The story involves a splinter of the Catholic church trying to bring a holy being into the world via forced impregnation. And she witnesses the suicide of another nun who kept insisting “It should have been me”.

Even keeping it vague to avoid spoilers for either movie, it’s incredibly strange how similar they are. With the way movie production works, not to mention the proximity of their filming schedules, of course they didn’t steal from each other. Rather, it speaks to the events of the day. It should surprise no one to learn that although both had been bouncing around since the mid-2010s, they entered development in earnest in 2022, the year of the Dobbs v. Jackson decision from the US Supreme Court, which removed all federal abortion protections, and led to many states either completely or effectively banning the medical procedure. Hell, The First Omen entered development about a week after the initial decision draft leaked in May 2022. It’s no wonder multiple projects quickly emerged that were concerned with the treatment of women and girls as mere vessels, whose purity is of the utmost concern to men, even as their personhood is not.

The main thing that separates these two movies is that Immaculate is aiming for nunsploitation, whereas The First Omen is more of an arthouse film. All the rest flows from there. Oh, and Margaret (Nell Tiger Free) can speak some Italian.

Of course, The First Omen also has a difficult job as a prequel to an incredibly popular and well-known horror franchise. It doesn’t matter if you’ve ever seen The Omen: you definitely know the name Damien, and probably that he’s the antichrist. As such, this movie pretty much has to end with him being born. Meaning director Arkasha Stevenson has to do that much more work to make the journey to that endpoint interesting in her feature film debut. Fortunately for all of us, she’s up to the task.

Very soon after Margaret arrives at the convent, she meets Carlita (Nicole Sorace), a troubled girl who’s been locked in the “Bad Room”. We learn that she suffers from vivid and terrifying visions which she feels compelled to draw, and which help to explain her somewhat strange behavior and ostracization. Margaret sees herself in the girl, as she too had disturbing visions as a girl, before Cardinal Lawrence (Bill Nighy) helped her realize they were nothing but tricks of the mind. Soon after meeting Carlita, she’s contacted by Father Brennan (Ralph Ineson), an ex-communicated priest who’s convinced Carlita is being isolated because a radical sect intends her to birth the antichrist. Why? They wish to drum up a threat they can control in order to drive the populace back to the church in the face of dwindling attendance.

If that seems like a pretty petty reason to begin playing with forces beyond their comprehension, well, yeah, that’s kind of the point. They’ve become corrupted by the years of power granted to them by existing at the center of Italian life, and the possibility of losing it feels like an existential threat. Especially as they see the “demise” of the values they’ve worked hard to instill in society, made manifest by the student protests taking place concurrently in Rome. It’s the drive for power fueled by a conviction that they know what’s right for the populace, viewing them as children to be punished, and the restriction of their rights as protecting them from themselves. Sound familiar? Maybe like a certain political party in the United States?

Stevenson finds some super unsettling and unique imagery to craft her tale. The snippets of vision we see from Margaret’s eyes are impressionistic and messed up, often involving seeing and hearing a person she doesn’t know appear to say something menacing or cryptic to her. The ones that are worse are the voices, which always seem to come from below, or the claw that periodically brushes her cheek. To say nothing of what she sees when stumbling across a local giving birth in the maternity ward.

This is an engaging film with well developed characters, but it’s held back by feeling beholden to both The Omen and mainstream horror. Despite its dark and unsettling vibes, it still leans a fair bit on jump scares. Some are reasonably well crafted or clever, but many feel like they just thought it was time to make us jump. There are ample usages of the “Lewton Bus” technique, and many of both types are accompanied by a loud noise, just to make sure it shocks your nervous system. As for the story telling, it starts to layer up a few too many elements, such that while they’re well executed, it loses track of a couple threads by the end.

All of that build leads to a climax which isn’t very satisfying. Stevenson starts to lose control of the imagery she’s wielding, as the distinction between vision and flashback and memory breaks down for the viewer, even as we don’t get any sense it does for Margaret. This culminates in another flashback (definitely a flashback this time) which reveals certain truths about a handful of characters, tumbling into another reveal which the majority of the audience has been hip to for quite some time. Although dense, it’s not quite as convoluted as it sounds, yet still caused me to cock a eyebrow in a “Really? This is what we’re going with?” expression.

Which is all before we get into story choices clearly driven by it being a franchise entry. Of course, I don’t blame Stevenson for any of that: she’s probably as frustrated by those constraints as I was. But the fact remains that tension they try to create in the final few scenes never really had a chance. They try to shift the focus to a place where it can land better, but don’t quite pull it off. The true capper and biggest groan, though, won’t come until the very last scene of the movie.

Still, my biggest takeaway is that the studio’s risk paid off. They gave a new filmmaker the reins to a hallowed franchise, and she was able to take it in a new and interesting direction despite the pressures inherent in that. It seems we’re in the middle of a wave of very strong female-directed horror films over the last few years. And with this film, Stevenson takes her place amongst Rose Glass, Nia DaCosta, Jane Schoenbrun, and Julia Ducournau, amongst others. She will be a force to be reckoned with for quite some time, and I look forward to whatever she does next.