The last time one of these Omen things came around — nearly twenty years ago! — I said we seem to get a lot of demonic cinema when there’s trouble in the Middle East (more so than usual, that is). I don’t know why. But the world situation is what it is, and lately we’ve gotten a slew of brimstone beasties. Last year gave us new installments of Evil Dead and The Exorcist, along with a group of others; this still-young year has brought Late Night with the Devil, Immaculate, and now The First Omen, a prequel set before the infernal events of the 1976 original. (It’s not a prequel to the 2006 remake, since we see a photo of the 1976 film’s star Gregory Peck here.) In such times, people prefer being scared by things that don’t remind them of the world outside the multiplex, I guess.
Visually, this may be the best-directed Omen yet. Cowriter/director Arkasha Stevenson and her cinematographer Aaron Martin offer an early-‘70s Rome done up in dark amber and burgundy, the color of hellfire, as though the world capital of Catholicism were hell on earth. Our heroine is Margaret (Nell Tiger Free), an American novitiate who arrives at an orphanage in Rome to take her vows as a nun. Margaret has been plagued by disturbing visions all her life, and she develops concern for an orphan girl named Carlita, whose drawings indicate similar troubling spectres. As Margaret eventually finds out — with the help of Father Brennan (Ralph Ineson), the priest headed for freak impalement in the ’76 film — she hasn’t been brought to Rome just to become a nun.
The movie is dark and often quiet, and takes its time. Arkasha Stevenson knows her stuff and creates a suffocating mood. It’s the script, whose end is designed to click neatly into the 1976 movie’s beginning, that lost me. Nell Tiger Free plays Margaret honorably, but as written she’s made a bit too perfect, boringly perfect. There’s more going on with Margaret’s roomie Luz (Maria Caballero), who wants to take Margaret out on the town before they both take their vows, and Sister Silvia (Sonia Braga), the chain-smoking, trampoline-hopping Abbess of the orphanage. These two women both imply vivid past lives before their calling, and Sonia Braga cast as a nun will amuse fans of her ‘70s and ‘80s work. Margaret might have been allowed her own secret quirks and foibles. Or perhaps the writers didn’t want to link female individualism with vulnerability to demonic interest.
In these movies it’s usually a virginal innocent (almost always female) who attracts the notice of Old Splitfoot, the better for her to lure him and risk being defiled by him. Such narratives tend not to be especially feminist. They’re not built to be. Stevenson and her collaborators try, however, to make this a glancingly empowering story by establishing rapport between women (this film, incidentally, would pass the Bechdel Test breezing). The problem is, the script doesn’t create any pockets of warmth between them, no funky humanity whose violation we can mourn. Even in the sober-sided original film there was David Warner as a skeevy tabloid photographer whose manner amusingly rubbed Gregory Peck the wrong way. There’s no David Warner figure in The First Omen, and it could have used one, desperately.
It does occur to me that these lacks may have more to do with studio meddling than with the creators, who may have initially delivered a movie more in line with what I might’ve liked. As it is, the film — despite freaky bits like a demonic birth that almost got an NC-17 rating — feels, like many prequels, like a bland and unnecessary story. We know, after all, that Damien will be born and taken into the highest halls of power until he grows up to be Sam Neill. Nothing in this film will — or will be allowed to — change that. The only story here is how Margaret, a nun from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, ends up being part of the Damien saga. She has nothing much intriguing about her aside from that, and despite what I’m sure were the writers’ best intentions, she becomes reduced to what these movies always reduce women to: her body.
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