THE FIRST OMEN Review
Halleluiah, Arkasha Stevenson's Debut Feature Film Resurrects THE OMEN Franchise
THE FIRST OMEN is a serpentine dance with evil and the demonology of power. Complex and filled with fright, it confronts the horror of trusting in those who claim to love you. It succeeds wildly and artfully in giving THE OMEN franchise a new reason to exist. The film has the classic gloss of studio horror films of the 1970s and the raw and graphic horrors of today’s leading edge of independent horror cinema. I cannot scream loudly enough that you should watch this film immediately in a theatre. It’s that brilliant, and if you are an Omen fan, a lapsed Catholic, or a stone-cold fan of horror in general, it will definitely be your jam.
Director Arkasha Stevenson creates dazzling demonic terror in her debut feature film, THE FIRST OMEN, which is pregnant with ideas and creativity. It is fertile yet fetid ground, and star Nell Tiger Free fascinates, as does the rest of the stellar cast: Tawfeek Barhom, Sônia Braga, Ralph Ineson, Bill Nighy, Charles Dance, Maria Caballero, Nicole Sorace, Ishtar Currie Wilson, and Andrea Arcangeli. This incredible cast falls in line with The Omen tradition since the franchise’s entries were stocked with powerful actors of each decade.
Rather than shying away from the realities of female anatomy and childbirth, Arkasha Stevenson leans into the body horror and weaponizes the vagina. While attempting to canonize the concept of motherhood, our society has rejected the realities and dangers of bearing children. Stevenson seems to say, “You’re afraid of vaginas? Okay, I’ll give you something to really be scared of with a vagina.” The celebrated vagina scene not only puts that thing that causes shame and anger in so many people in the center of the screen, it also makes it seductively beautiful. My mouth was on the floor, and I was both scared and in awe at the same time.
THE FIRST OMEN is a masterpiece of misdirection. Using the jumble that the human mind makes of memories, scenes are shown, but they might not be in the place that you assume that they are in the story.
I have to mention the film's casting directors, Kharmel Cochrane and Teresa Razzauti. Not only did they choose beautiful actors, but ones with oddly beautiful, bewitching faces and haunted eyes. The characters' faces go a long way toward establishing the film’s atmosphere of free-floating dread and paranoia.
The film’s synopsis is this: “A young American woman is sent to Rome to begin a life of service to the church but encounters a darkness that causes her to question her faith and uncovers a terrifying conspiracy that hopes to bring about the birth of evil incarnate.”
It is clearly a prequel to the 1976 original, so it has the mammoth task of creating a new origin story for a movie with a dedicated fanbase that will insist on certain things. But Arkasha Stevenson, who co-wrote the film with Tim Smith and Keith Thomas, have collectively found many different answers to the question.
The trouble with prequels is that they are sometimes too reverential to the originals and take no real liberties with the story. THE FIRST OMEN takes a big leap and, by doing so, crafts an entirely new shade of conspiracy and terror that has a basis in reality. If you are going to do a remake, a reboot, or a prequel, you have to add something significant to the mix, or you are just repeating the past. The audience needs something new and unique, or they could just watch the original.
As I have observed before, The Omen films, the original ones anyway, have always been about power and the acquisition of power. In the world of The Omen’s antichrist, the power of the Thorn family will give Damien the tools to bring about Satan's reign on Earth. What Arkasha Stevenson, Tim Smith, and Keith Thomas know is that the story has always focused on Damien himself. While we have been told certain things about his history, how was he actually born on Earth? It leaves an entirely untilled field for the filmmakers to sow, which is the perfect planting ground for a prequel.
Part of what makes The Omen movies so effective is the eerie feeling of a shadowy conspiracy surrounding the protagonists. The feeling that the Devil and his minions are trying to influence events and kill people all around you and that one day, the conspiracy will come for you when your presence becomes inconvenient.
Since Stevenson chooses to focus on the circumstances of the Antichrist's birth, it confronts The Omen’s big secret, which is that the child who was born of a jackal and was a changeling in the Thorn family. But that origin story, while sounding cool, is essentially hooey. From the standpoint of physiology, a cross-species birth only makes sense if the mother is human. Jackals are smaller than coyotes, so the idea that a jackal could gestate and successfully give birth to a human baby is unlikely. It makes more sense that the demon side of Damien’s nature is male, and the mother is a human being.
In THE FIRST OMEN, the key to making the story new and relevant to our world, even though it is clearly a period film, is to update those circumstances. This leads you to the central theme of the film, which is body autonomy and the role of women in our society. Female rage is the main driver of the action after a certain point in the narrative, and it is no coincidence at this time when fundamentalist politicians and commentators are trying to strip women of every single human right that they have won in the last fifty-five years since the concept of no-fault divorce was legalized in 1969. What these religious fundamentalists, not Catholic, by the way, obviously want is to shove women back into the kitchen to become submissive brood mares.
Misogyny has a birthplace, and it is largely in religion and politics, where men seek to control what they are afraid of and what they don’t understand. Women are also party to this effort, as many women have been indoctrinated to believe that women aren’t as smart or strong as men and cannot be allowed to excel to disprove this societal thesis. THE FIRST OMEN not only shows the machinations of men who use love and warmth to manipulate impressionable women but also the part that other women play through internalized misogyny, as they act as helpers to gaslight those who rebel and convince them that they are bad when they ask questions or challenge male authority.
The microcosm is the role of nuns in the Catholic Church. As is explicitly shown in THE FIRST OMEN, Margaret is a novice who has come to Rome to complete her novitiate, or the period of service a woman must complete to join an order of nuns and become a nun for life. Most people think only of the piety of nuns and their good works for the community, but it is a lesser-known fact that nuns, when taking the veil, are essentially marrying the Church and becoming a bride of Christ. That part of becoming a nun has been pushed to the side in common knowledge and relegated to being “old fashioned,” but that is the basis of becoming a nun. It is a ritual intended to seal the control of nuns as individuals by divine right. If you are a bride of Christ and the Church, you would never contradict or do harm to the Church by opposing its viewpoints or actions. Right?
Women, as nuns, are considered servants, as is shown in THE FIRST OMEN, when nuns are shown typing and completing other tasks, like caring for orphan children and birthing the children of unwed mothers, as they are contracted to do by the Italian government. If you consider it, there is a distinct aura of exploitation to the whole idea. I don’t see nuns getting paychecks for all of this labor that the Church profits from. It follows that these same people running the Church would have no problem with other types of exploitation, specifically centered on the gifts that women have, i.e., the ability to bear children. Recurring images of women being restrained and the cruel tools of gynecology that have no regard for the pain of women as they scream in terror unnerve you. The fact that these women are driven to start giggling does indicate that they are being driven toward madness, but it also hints at one of the most common complaints lodged against women. Why can’t you be happier? Smile more? The film turns this common insult towards women inside out, showing the scream inside the woman trying to retain control of herself.
Yes, the nuns have room and board, but they are expected to do the bidding of the Church, no matter what that bidding might be. Women, in the microcosm that is THE FIRST OMEN, reflect the macrocosm of society and are chattel. In history, women who were considered inconvenient were forced to become nuns, specifically in the middle ages. As Margaret starts to suspect that the child Carlita Scianna might have a particularly nasty fate in store for her, is it such a stretch to imagine that this kind of exploitation might possibly be true?
One of the most terrifying and saddest things in the film is watching the light of love and belief die in Nell Tiger Free’s eyes, as Margaret, when all of the veils are finally pulled from her eyes, Watching the flames of her anger rise when she discovers the betrayal of the people who claimed to love her feels empowering and heartbreaking—the horror of realizing that you are disposable to the people and the Church that you adore and believe in wholeheartedly.
But this realization is not just for women; for all of the female characters that are sacrificed in the name of the plot, about the same amount or possibly more men die as well. You should always be skeptical of any entity that would willingly sacrifice any of its people for the entity’s survival. It’s not just about the issue of pro-choice beliefs; it's about our autonomy and our right to exist in the way that we choose to live and as human beings.
Another connective tissue that THE FIRST OMEN shares with The Omen is the name Scianna, which is on the grave of what is supposed to be Damien’s mother. Even more, the idea that caused Robert Thorn grief and led to his death was that Damien was, after all, still human, even though he was the son of Satan, and that idea is given even more time to cook in THE FIRST OMEN.
Damien, in any of The Omen films, never asked for this. The parentage and the legacy of their parentage are not his fault and are another branching of the film’s themes. Time is spent showing that a demon child can be subject to terrible visions that the people of the church tell them is a mental defect. But they are still capable of kindness, purity, and fully capable of making good moral choices with the proper guidance. They are not just evil but can, with help, be good people. They can resist the urges in their DNA. It is a great reminder of the Biblical story of free will. People choose their own path and do evil or do good including members and leaders of the Church.
Stevenson has essentially left all the pieces of the secret all around you in the film. If you pay attention and put them all together, you have the joy of figuring it out yourself. If you don’t, then you have the dread of the reveal of who the mother of the antichrist really is. Either way, it’s a brilliantly conceived prequel.
There’s a moment in the second sequence of the film when Margaret arrives at Leonardo da Vinci International Airport, more commonly known as Fiumicino Airport, which is an arrival gilded with the excitement of the Eternal City, a small clue that’s easy to miss in the joy of the moment. The spider’s web of the plot is another recurring motif in the film, with images of spiders crawling over bodies and masses of spiders spinning webs popping up at different intervals.
Even the supernaturally assisted deaths in THE FIRST OMEN have connective tissue to The Omen. The first is an object falling from the sky; the second is a suicide, and the third involves an automobile. But they are different enough and spectacular enough to stand on their own and be thematically in tune with the events in THE FIRST OMEN. Look at the shape of the wound in the first death. Much has been made of the presence of the vagina shot in this movie, and it is very frightening, especially to women, but it’s not the only vagina in the film.
More connection comes from the use of lore in The Omen about the Satanic birthmarks. They don’t always appear in the same place, which is the nature of birthmarks. There is also a dreadful reveal of the birthmark under the hair, but how it is discovered is inverted.
Some have said that the prequel changes Damien’s origin story, and I argue the opposite. The nature of THE FIRST OMEN’s conspiracy is all about covering up the true story, and the prequel leaves the structure intact by telling the true story of the conspiracy. The chilling reveal of the Italian graveyard in The Omen remains because the conspiracy has concocted a story to absolve themselves of blame. They created the grave and scary story should someone ever discover the grave. It would essentially frighten them and lead them nowhere.
No one must know who is truly responsible, and they will destroy anyone who tries to tell the truth. In this, they are exactly like the minions of the Devil. It forces you to consider some truly unpleasant possibilities about the evil in human beings and the Adversary’s influence on all people on Earth. Perhaps, without knowing it, we have all done the bidding of Satan in our daily lives.
The cinematography of THE FIRST OMEN by Aaron Morton (Abigail, No One Will Save You) is another excellent work. The film’s golden-hued interiors are lovely, but the 70s-style haze, which looks almost identical to Gilbert Taylor's cinematography in the original Omen, visually and reverently connects the styles of the two films. The living beauty of the film’s images contributes to the power of the scares, and the images, particularly the scene with Margaret in prayer between two sets of candles, look like a painting.
The soundtrack by Mark Korven (The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Black Phone) builds on Jerry Goldsmith's justifiably iconic score from The Omen and, like the filmmakers, weaves parts of what went before into a new fabric. But the score does stand alone, and Korven’s talent shines.
THE FIRST OMEN is a film in which the evil is more devasting and rapacious than the Devil himself. Villany is nestled in our hearts. Who needs Satan when we have other human beings?