The First Omen Movie Review 2024
t’s always the way — you wait years for a pregnancy-focused nunsploitation movie, and then three come along within about a month. We’ve had Immaculate, with Sydney Sweeney, seemingly knocked up by the good Lord; Maria Vera Ratti pregnant with twins (one the Antichrist, one the Second Coming) in Deliver Us; and now The First Omen, a prequel to the 1976 landmark horror about a young boy who could be the devil incarnate.
You don’t need to have seen the original film to get to grips with this one, though. From the straight-out-of-the-box character types, to the employment of various horror tropes (hello, creepy children’s drawings!), it’s all going to feel recognisable to anyone with a passing familiarity with religion-themed horror movies. Shadowy robes hanging on the wall that could be a lurking menace? Check. Little girls in white dresses singing a creepy song? Check. Ancient engravings giving off absurdly cursed vibes? Of course! And populating the convent where most of the action goes down, we have a fairly pleasing line-up of typical movie nuns: stern mother superior Sister Silva (Sônia Braga), intense believer Sister Anjelica (Ishtar Currie-Wilson), BFF Luz (Maria Caballero), and new-in-town novice nun Margaret (Nell Tiger Free).
In the lead, Free gives a sympathetic performance as the wide-eyed innocent who seems troubled by hints of a dark past, while Bill Nighy makes a welcome appearance in full cassock as an urbane cardinal; nobody can casually throw away ripe lines like, “The miracle of life can be a messy business,” quite like Nighy.
The elements are all here, but it takes a while for the action to go beyond the signs and portents stage and get into the meat of the plot. There’s a general sense that less would have been more: the film is crying out for tighter editing — too often, we’ve got what we need from a scene but then it just keeps going. Still, despite pacing issues, the gnarly set-pieces (Birthing a monster! Convenient car crash! Non-consensual C-section!) take a satisfyingly no-half-measures approach.
