The First Omen: Satan Shows Signs of Aging in Uninspired Omen Franchise Entry

By Thom Ernst

Rating: C+

I have held my tongue about prequels long enough.

I’ve been suspicious of them since Butch and Sundance: The Early Days (1978) although prequels have been with usaround since 1920 with The Golem: How He Came Into the World.

Prequels can work—I hold out hope for the upcoming Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and I enjoy the occasional episodes of Young Sheldon, a re-imagining of the Sheldon Cooper character from The Big Bang Theory as a precocious child. But there’s something disingenuous about circling back on another person’s story and staking claim as having started it all.  

Sonia Braga and Nell Tiger Free in The First Omen.

I felt that disingenuousness in The First Omen. It’s the title. The First Omen. Presumptuous, no? I was there in 1976 when the first Omen was released, and I can tell you that The First Omen is no first Omen.

This is the feature debut from director Arkasha Stevenson, noted for her television work on the horror anthology Channel Zero (2016 – 18) and on the series, Brand New Cherry Flavor (2021).  Apparently, she can work her way around a horror story.  Indeed, Stevenson crams The First Omen with creepy bits of foreboding and a perpetual push towards an impending terror, but only insofar as is required of the genre—a genre whose tropes are now tiresomely familiar.

The First Omen is nunsploitation disguised as religious horror bordering on art house. And while individual snippets from the film qualify as genuinely eerie, the overall impression is of a tale told twice-too often. The clergy wear their inner demon on their faces, especially the elderly ones whose stern, unmoveable and weathered expressions add an indelible touch of ageism to the film’s anti-Catholic sentiments.

Not that the Catholic organization hasn’t earned our distrust and provided storytellers with endless cause to villainize them, but at this point, the targeting seems uninventive.

But you can’t make an Omen(lette) with cracking a few nuns.

The First Omen is filled with evil clergy—extremists who have successfully entrenched themselves in the walls and crevices of the church. They’re easy to spot: They’re the ones staring, scowling and whispering.  And if you happen to spy on them through cracks in the door, they will make sudden and unexpected eye-contact.  

Here, too, are unnerving children who draw dark disturbing pictures and who act out violently towards the nuns and other girls. And then there are the series of religiously inspired hallucinations, psychedelic flashes of a fevered dream where bizarre looking priests and sacrilegious etchings hint at a colossal secret.  

The First Omen starts promising setting-up elaborate ‘act of God’ death sequences.  It appears that Satan has a preferred method of killing as several of the kills, with a bit of tinkering, resemble the death scenes from the original Omen.

But the film morphs from gruesome, domino-effect deaths and into a psychological horror filled with nightmarish images. The images lead us towards an ending that, in the context of religious horror, makes sense. But repetitive flashes of the images on screen feel more like filler than horror.  Stevenson, who also co-wrote the script with Tim Smith and Keith Thomas, gives us a series of unexplained murders with cringe-in-your-seat body horror; the kind men imagine, and women know.

Keith Thomas, although solely a screenwriter on this project, directed the recent Firestarter remake, which I am not quite ready to forgive.

The film is set prior to the events in the original Omen that ends with Ambassador Thorne attempting to stab his Antichrist child with sacred knives.

Margaret (Nell Tiger Free) transfers to Rome from the convent/orphanage where she was raised from being a problem child to a devotee of the church. Margaret is about to make her commitment complete by becoming a nun. She is welcomed by her friend and mentor, Cardinal Lawrence (Bill Nighy), idolized by the young impressionable Father Gabriel (Tawfeek Barhom) and, initially, embraced by Sister Silva (Sonia Braga).

Margaret befriends an older child named Carlita (Nicole Sorace) whose erratic behaviour keeps her locked up in the ‘bad room’.  But Margaret’s allegiance to Carlita turns to doubt when a priest, haunted by the burden of a horrifying truth, attempts to warn Margaret of a troubling prophesy.

Despite an earnest script which tells the story with neither a nod nor a wink, the threat of the Antichrist lacks the deep rooted fear it once held.   

The filmmakers might have fared better if they’d sat things out until real world horrors to started to die down. Being threatened by the Antichrist is reminiscent of Dr. Evil, the reanimated ‘60s supervillain from Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, who demands a million-dollar ransom to save  the world from destruction. Set in the late ‘90s, Evil’s demand is not the astronomical amount he believes it is.

And so, it is with the Devil. Infernal Evil has too much competition these days to be truly frightening.

The First Omen. Directed by Arkasha Stevenson. Stars Nell Tiger Free, Bill Nighy, Tawfeek Barhom, Sônia Braga and Nicole Sorace. The First Omen begins April 5, 2024, at selected theatres.