The First Omen

  Like probably a lot of people my age, easy access on TV meant I watched The Omen early and often. I don't think it was particularly formative (embarrassingly, the killer cat in Uninvited featured a lot more in my nightmares than anything lil' Damien and his satanic rottweilers ever got up to), but its emphasis and slow build up to its bizarre deaths and general bleakness must have fucked me up somehow, even if I have next to zero nostalgia for it.

 And now, thanks to god knows what satanic shenanigans, we finally get a prequel answering a bunch of questions no one asked themselves in the intervening forty-eight years. Maybe they'll try to remake the original again in a couple of years in time for its fiftieth anniversary.

 If nothing else, it's a movie that gets The Omen at a fundamental level, but isn't afraid to have a lot of fun with it too. Witness the prelude to the movie, where two priests -father Brennan (Ralph Ineson, whose voice gave the subwoofers at the cinema a pretty good workout) and father Harris (Charles Dance) meet to discuss some Matters of Grave Import. We know Brennan survives to be in the 1976 movie, but as for the other guy... the film has a lot of fun building up to his death, slathering on tension and compounding it with multiple shots of rickety scaffolding and stained-glass windows being hoisted high up by cranes. And when the inevitable death comes, it's both gruesome and slyly funny.

 But it's not time for Brenan yet - he's just a supporting character. The protagonist is Margaret (Nell Tiger Free), an American orphan who arrives in Rome to take her vows under the auspices of Cardinal Lawrence (Bill Nighy).

 Margaret is to work at a church-run orphanage under the careful watch of sister Silva (Sonia Braga), and boards with Luz (Maria Caballero), a smoking, sexy novitiate who seems cool and goes out clubbing every night.

 Things settle into your usual horror-movie-nunnery rhythms quickly; Margaret is a hit with the (adorable) Italian girls she's looking after, and quickly develops a special bond with social castaway Carlita (Nicole Sorace) who's constantly locked in her room for bad behaviour.

 At night, Luz takes her out on a night of debauchery, so it's not all bad. And of course, strange incidents begin to mount: A nun hangs herself in a direct reference to the original Omen (and also sets herself on fire and breaks a window while doing it - it's 2024, a straight hanging would be too quaint!), Margaret observes some shady goings on with the senior nuns, there's a horrifying birth scene, that sort of thing.

 So when father Brennan returns from the prologue and warns Margaret that something is horribly wrong, it doesn't take much convincing before she's looking for clues about some sort of horrific satanic conspiracy surrounding her ward Carlita. One thing leads to another- in this case, a series of pretty effective, gruesome scenes with an emphasis on body horror, and a deluge of clumsily dosed exposition.

 Yes, it's predictable, and having to contort to the shape of a prequel to a movie that seriously didn't need one to begin with hurts it a lot. The shape of its narrative is bent out of whack, and while the mystery starts out being compelling, it's easy to see where the pieces will fall, leaving an obvious twist that leads to the foreordained conclusion - and the way the script (by Tim Smith, Director Arkasha Stevenson and Steve Thomas) cheekily subverts it - an oddly underwhelming experience.

 So while The First Omen's story is a bit of a bust, it's full of likeable characters and indelible images. Director Arkasha Stevenson and her cinematographer Aaron Morton craft a lusty, creepy, atmospheric and often gorgeous movie that's highly horror-literate (check out those references to Rosemary's Baby and Possession!). It's not perfect - there are a few too many cheesy jump scares, some dodgy effects, and the big supposedly horrific aftermath to a car accident is handled so ineptly that it had most of the people at the theater I saw this on laughing out loud, which is probably not the intended reaction. But mostly it succeeds, and a couple of standout sequences manage a ridiculous level of intensity.

An eye or a mouth? Guessing the second, based on the prominence of a medieval picture of Satan devouring a fool later. In any case, it looks amazing.

 The themes are strong, if a bit blunt, especially with regards to women's rights over their own bodies; The scenes where they're most made manifest correspond almost one-to-one to the film's best, most harrowing moments. It stumbles when trying to update the original movie's very '70s paranoia for modern audiences (who will probably, and justifiably, tend to mistrust anyone belonging to the catholic church anyways) in a  deeply stupid retroactive change to the series' conspiracy trappings. Yes, making a modern-day omen was always going to be an uphill battle, but I'm not about to cut them some slack for a fight they picked.

 Nell Tiger Free is a highlight - not that you could tell from her subdued performance, but her Possession-like freakout is towering. Ineson is as likeable (and his voice as uncanny) as ever, and Braga and Nighy are the consummate professionals they've ever been, even if they don't really get a chance to show the young ones how it's done. I found Mark Korven's soundtrack occasionally annoying, but it's faithful to Jerry Goldsmith's original score, and its attempts to replicate a theremin with human voices are pretty entertaining.

 More than anything else, Stevenson assured vision marks the addition of another talented, unique voice to the genre - based on this and The Dream Door season for Channel Zero, I can't wait to see what she does next.