Describe This Movie In One Seinfeld Quote:
ELAINE: Maybe a dingo ate your baby.Brief Plot Synopsis: The devil made her do it. Literally.
Rating Using Random Objects Relevant To The Film: 3.5 Devil Insides (Devils Inside?) out of 5.
Tagline: "Uncover the terrifying secret behind the birth of evil."
Better Tagline: "You think *you've* got daddy issues."
Not So Brief Plot Synopsis: Margaret (Nell Tiger Free) has just arrived in Rome to take the veil and become a nun. She has the support of the local Cardinal (Bill Nighy), Sister Silva (Sonia Braga), and carefree roommate Luz (Maria Caballero), but something's off about the orphanage where she's working. First, there's disturbed teen Carlita (Nicole Sorace), then excommunicated Father Brennan (Ralph Inseon), who warns Margaret of sinister goings-on involving the Church. Finally, there are Margaret's own disturbing visions. Taken together, one might almost call them ... omens.
"Critical" Analysis: The First Omen, a prequel to Richard Donner's 1976 classic, gets a lot right: the mid-1970s setting is pretty dead on, Mark Korven's (Cube, The Witch) score calls back to Jerry Goldsmith's "Ave Satani," and man is it nice to see film shot in actual locations again.
Considering it's arriving as closely as it is on the heels of Late Night with the Devil and The Conjuring Cinematic Universe, you might be thinking: "Gee, this is a lot of Satanic content. Haven't we had enough movies about exorcism and possession?"
First of all: shut up. Second, The First Omen is less concerned with the "who" of the Antichrist and looks more into the "how." In that way, it's a ... how to say this in as innocuous a way as possible? ... revealing look indeed.
There's considerably more body horror than usual for one of these movies, in other words. And when your main character is a woman, and the key subplot involves incubating the spawn of Satan, you can probably connect those dots yourself. I'm not in the habit of including trigger warnings in my reviews, but if *my* jaded ass flinched at several scenes ... well, you do the math.
As Margaret, Free crosses a lot of streams, from eager novitiate to Final Girl (of sorts), juxtaposing her honest desire to help people with a growing distrust of Catholic bureaucracy. She also gets in some impressive full body acting. Nighy and Braga are there as the obligatory Recognizable Names You're Immediately Suspicious Of, while Ineson's excellent baritone all but guarantees no one lies to Father Brennan in the confessional.
Sorace does what she can as potential human incubator Carlita, though it remains to be seen if "she wasn't conceived naturally" is going to click with modern audiences. Between the various methods of assisted reproductive technology (not you, Alabama), artificial insemination, intrafallopian transfer, and others, a healthy portion of newborns are conceived "unnaturally."
But you know what will click? Distrusting the Catholic Church. If you don't count outliers like The Devils or Mark of the Devil from the '70s, this antagonism is a fairly recent development. And even if real world atrocities like the Church's systemic concealment of sexual assault isn't enough, you can rest assured the organization behind the Spanish Inquisition has been ripe material for villainy.
Which isn't to say that The First Omen doesn't wear its influences shamelessly. It pays homage to several kills from the original Omen, and inevitably pulls that film into its denouement. And evidently no one in the production camp was too worried about Roman Polanski raising a stink over resemblances to Rosemary's Baby.
Wonder why that is.
More intriguing is the recalling of John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness, which posited that maybe omnipotent deities don't always have our best interests at heart. The First Omen brushes up against these concepts, employing atmosphere and period authenticity to deflect any accusations of inauthenticity, and in that sense it succeeds.
And if we're being honest, newborns are already pretty creepy looking.
The First Omen is in theaters today.
