Vague Visages’ The First Omen review contains minor spoilers. Arkasha Stevenson’s 2024 movie features Nell Tiger Free, Ralph Ineson and Sonia Braga. Check out the VV home page for more film reviews, along with cast/character summaries, streaming guides and complete soundtrack song listings.

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Audiences might experience déjà vu during The First Omen, and not because of the film’s connection to Richard Donner’s original supernatural chiller from 1976. Following a fresh American expat aiming to rise through the ranks of the Italian church, the bloody prequel charts startlingly similar territory to the 2024 Sydney Sweeney vehicle Immaculate — another nunsploitation effort with several set set pieces similar to those in Arkasha Stevenson’s 2024 franchise installment. But what distinguishes The First Omen’s horror is that it has loftier aims than paying tribute to a legacy horror franchise or offering cheap, exploitative shocks, showing off a genre literacy from the opening moments that nods towards several classics.

During The First Omen’s unsettling prologue, Father Brennan (Ralph Ineson, boasting an Irish accent near indistinguishable from his own Yorkshire brogue) seemingly witnesses the death of another church elder (Charles Dance as Father Harris). The sequence is shot with the same lyrical classicism as the opening act of Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009), as a bloody tragedy unleashed from above unfurls in haunting slow motion. Later, during the climax, a disturbing, supernatural transformation unfolds in a single take, conveyed entirely through performance alone, in a manner designed to invite comparisons to Isabelle Adjani’s psychotic subway breakdown in Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession (1981). In-between, there are set pieces which channel the intense claustrophobia of Roman Polanski’s Apartment Trilogy and Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! (2017), along with a few nods to the original franchise film. Needless to say, when someone inevitably utters the name “Damien” for the first time in The First Omen, it’s a deflating experience. Suddenly, a movie which has successfully carved out its own distinct space within a wider franchise is pushed back in-line with it, compromising what had been, to that point, a singular vision masquerading as a nostalgia cash-grab.

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In The First Omen, Margaret (Nell Tiger Free) arrives in Rome during the early 1970s, with the Years of Lead still in their infancy following the widespread strikes and protests at the end of the previous decade. A decline in living standards led many to turn away from the Church, including several other volunteers in the orphanage that the protagonist has been assigned to, such as her roommate Luz (Maria Caballero) — an immediate bad influence upon introduction. They sneak off to enjoy a night out in the city together, with Margaret waking up the next day after blacking out, immediately suspecting something has gone wrong. Free’s character soon discovers that she’s walked into a supernatural conspiracy at the very heart of the Church.

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What The First Omen lacks in innovation it makes up for in boldness, pushing familiar supernatural genre tropes about the secret relationship between the Church and the Devil to ideological extremes. So, while there may not be any gasps at each new conspiratorial revelation, it’s still easy to appreciate a major studio release unafraid to risk protests on account of faith or ridicule for the extents to which it pushes the conceit established in the original movie, all while minimizing links to it wherever possible. Any protestors of Immaculate might wish they saved their time and effort for The First Omen, which has a far less ambiguous ideology that’s designed to challenge contemporary viewers in spite of the period setting, using an over-the-top allegory to question the importance and necessity of religion during moments of political turbulence.

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The original “Omen” trilogy also shares this idea as a thematic preoccupation, pushing it to the silliest possible extreme during a third installment, in which a grown-up Damien attempts to brainwash the Western world as the American ambassador to Britain (if there’s a Ronald Reagan/Margaret Thatcher-era satire more on-the-nose than this, I’m yet to hear of it). By that point, the initial iteration of the franchise was on a downward trajectory in the eyes of critics and audiences, bluntly restating ideas already present in the original movie, such as the decline in living standards across much of the world presenting a convincing argument for the presence of the Devil on Earth. 

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This is whyThe First Omen’s 70s setting might be its masterstroke, as it cleanly weaves the idea within the original franchise timeline, but in a way loose enough to invite comparisons to contemporary anxieties. The initial protests across Italy gave way to several years of unrest, all sparked by — in the broadest possible sense —  the concept that millions of poor people had been left behind by recent economic policies. Like many contemporary populist movements, fuel was only added to the fire when the political establishment shrugged off this sentiment, unable to put the toothpaste back in the tube once those ideas had found a home in the world.

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Despite The First Omen’s period setting, there is prescient idea of turning away from a higher power due to a sense of hopelessness within your own life. In times of despair, there’s something darkly funny about those in power turning to the gravest possible solution to get people back on their side, in the same manner that mainstream political parties inch further right for votes. It might be overreaching to think of The First Omen as a political satire, but when a Satanic conspiracy is unveiled that directly addresses female reproductive rights and bodily autonomy in the goriest conceivable ways, it’s hard not to think Stevenson and co-writers Tim Smith and Keith Thomas lucked into finding the perfect franchise as a Trojan Horse for their grim, timely metaphor. Whether it meets the moment is another question altogether — but for audacity alone, it deserves some commending.

Alistair Ryder (@YesitsAlistair) is a film and TV critic based in Manchester, England. By day, he interviews the great and the good of the film world for Zavvi, and by night, he criticizes their work as a regular reviewer at outlets including The Film Stage and Looper.

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