‘The First Omen’ Is a Pointless Prequel Beyond Redemption
An entertainingly cheesy attempt to piggyback on the success of The Exorcist, 1976’s The Omen concerns a United States ambassador (Gregory Peck) and his wife (Lee Remick) who, following the untimely death of their child, adopt a baby boy named Damien—a boy they eventually learn is none other than the Antichrist. Since Damien is himself an infant at the start of Richard Donner’s franchise initiator, and his lineage is clearly spelled out by the conclusion of its tale, there’s seemingly little more to say about his earlier days. Nonetheless, the only thing more insidious than Beelzebub himself is pop culture’s endless strip-mining of easily marketable IP, and thus, The First Omen is here to reveal the true origins of the son of Satan—other than, you know, that he’s the son of Satan, which is the sole thing worth knowing about him in the first place.
Like last year’s The Nun II, The First Omen (in theaters April 5) is a period piece about an American woman of the cloth who relocates to an Italian convent beset by demonic forces. In this case, that figure is Margaret (Servant’s Nell Tiger Free), a former orphan whose devout path to the nunnery is overseen by Cardinal Lawrence (Bill Nighy) and leads her to Rome. It’s 1971, and the city is plagued by strikes by both workers and students who no longer see value in traditional ways of life—including the Catholic Church. Lawrence hopes that, in her own small way, Margaret can help reverse that trend and lure people back to the light of God. This is a mission for which she’s well-equipped, although from the moment she arrives at her new residence, she’s drawn to Carlita Scianna (Nicole Sorace), a teenage girl who’s perpetually locked away in her room and greets Margaret by crawling under a bed, grabbing her face, and giving her cheek a big, wet lick.
Carlita is a creepy weirdo, and The First Omen means for us to assume that she’s either Lucifer’s progeny or bride; a prologue depicts Father Brennan (Ralph Ineson) receiving a photo of an infant in the church’s care with the name “Scianna” written on its backside, and then watching as the man who gifted him this picture, Father Harris (Charles Dance), meets a grisly fate. Strange machinations are afoot in and around Margaret’s home, but at least early on, the young woman is too naïve to suspect much, even if she is perturbed by Carlita’s drawings of nuns floating in the air and carrying creatures in their wombs. Mostly, she’s consumed with fitting into this enclave a process complicated by her roommate Luz (Maria Caballero)— a free-spirit who, before “taking the veil,” wants to have wild sexual fun in the city, given that as she tells Margaret, you have to know who you are before you can give yourself to God.