Film review – The First Omen (2024)

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My notes on The First Omen (2024)

Mild spoilers.

The flame of this franchise has flickered intermittently since Damien Thorn (Sam Neill) got backstabbed with a dagger of Meggido just after the Second Coming in The Final Conflict back in 1981.  There’ve been sequels, remakes, parodies and TV spinoffs but the only item really to pop its head over the parapet is the spoof Good Omens.  But no backlist remains unraided these days … so here’s the story of what went on in the weeks before Ambassador Thorn (a picture of Gregory Peck) was persuaded to adopt the Antichrist.  The series has never been big on continuity, so we shouldn’t complain that Nell Tiger Free isn’t playing a jackal (reliable James Swanton and Andjelko Pavlovic share that gig) and Ralph Ineson doesn’t seem to have a 666 birthmark.

It could scarcely have been foretold that there’d be a planetary alignment and The First Omen would arrive on screens barely two weeks after Immaculate, which overlaps it to an extraordinary degree.  In both films, young American nuns in Italy are manipulated by a Catholic conspiracy to bring messiahs to term.  A lot of plot beats echo between the films, as well as a general sense of the Vatican being up to no good and viewing women as expendable vessels.  That one is about the Second Coming of Christ (maybe) and the other the summoning of the Antichrist ought to make them mirror images, but neither quite get into what their nativities might mean going forward … indeed, it’s the possible mother of Christ who tumbles that her godly bosses think they’re hastening the end of the world.

In The Omen, the baddies were (it’s implied) apostate priests who’d turned to Satanism – this was a big thing, as seen in The Devils and To the Devil a Daughter – and there was apparently a global network of sinister souls (‘the Disciples of the Watch’) out to protect and support Damien – who didn’t really need them since freak accidents befall anyone who mildly inconveniences him.  Here, the likes of Charles Dance, Sonia Braga and Bill Nighy are sincere Catholic Christians, and their this-couldn’t-possibly-go-wrong scheme is to bring the Antichrist into the world of 1971 – Italy is racked by strikes and protests and the young have turned away from the church – to inspire a religious revival.  Fair enough – in the years since this boom started with Rosemary’s Baby, Satanists have been more likely to be victims of unfounded allegations while churches have condoned and covered up abuses on an industrial scale.

In a sense, this is the anti-Omen – like Immaculate, it lays into the dog-collared smuggos who’ve been painted as heroes in dozens of Exorcist knock-offs … though we’ve almost reached the point where it’d be a refreshing change to have some Dennis Wheatley-style scarlet-robed goat-botherers as villains.  Margaret (Free) is the naïve soul who has been raised in the church and brought to Italy to go through much the same tsuris as Sydney Sweeney in Immaculate – though that was supremely uninterested in becoming a franchise and let Sweeney go for it in the finish in a way Free isn’t allowed to.  There’s a bit of back and forth mystery involving a troubled orphan (Nicole Sorace) but no one will be fooled by her plot feint.  Callbacks are obligatory – one-upping the ‘it’s all for you, Damien’ suicide is a flaming fall and the occasional mishap takes supporting characters off the board in gruesome, grim style.

Director Arkasha Stevenson, who also co-wrote with Tim Smith and Keith Thomas from a story by Ben Jacoby, doesn’t have the resources to match the luxurious feel of Richard Donner’s original – a big studio movie which went out of its way to highlight its own production values – and so goes for a lower-key, slightly hysterical tone which compares favourably with, say, Exorcist: Believer and The Nun 2 while recognisably inhabiting the same stratum of horror.  As in Godzilla Minus One, the expected music cue – Jerry Goldsmith’s ‘Ave Satani’ – is witheld for maximum impact.

Towards the end, it becomes apparent that this would like to be the first film in a trilogy.  A major new never-before-mentioned character shows up on screen with probable implications for the story going forward.  Also we haven’t learned, for instance, where Billie Whitelaw’s character comes from (unless we presume Maria Caballero’s sexy sinister nun can put on a mummerset accent).  All this will present a continuity nightmare if further films decide to weave in and out of not only The Omen but at least the first two sequels.  Ineson matches Troughton’s haircut and brogue, but has a way to go before he’s twitchy and sweaty enough to walk under a lightning rod.  It’s the best Omen-related work since Damien Omen II, but the bar isn’t that high.