The First Omen is the kind of prequel that shows up to a long-dead franchise, flips the lights back on, and says, “So, who’s ready to be emotionally and theologically wrecked?”
Against all odds, it works. And it doesn’t just work—it might be the best Omen movie since the original, which is sort of like saying you’re the most functional member of the Thorn family, but still: it’s a genuine compliment.
A Nun, an Orphanage, and Absolutely No Safe Adults
Set in Rome in 1971, The First Omen follows American novice Margaret (Nell Tiger Free), who arrives at the Vizzardeli Orphanage expecting prayer, service, and maybe some light Catholic guilt. Instead she gets political unrest, creepy kids, a deeply cursed disco night, and a Church conspiracy so evil it makes the original film’s baby swap look like a mild HR violation.
Margaret bonds with troubled orphan Carlita, who’s being treated like a walking omen (sorry) by the clergy. Father Brennan (Ralph Ineson, weaponizing his gravelly voice like a blunt object) warns Margaret that “evil things” are brewing, which is rich coming from a man in a movie about the Catholic Church trying to manufacture the Antichrist for PR purposes.
From there, the movie plays like a conspiracy thriller wrapped in a possession film wrapped in a very bad vocation retreat: suicides, riots, demonic hallucinations, and a pile of documents labeled “Scianna” full of photos of malformed infants, all bearing that ominous 666 birthmark. Margaret slowly discovers that she’s not just a bystander in this story—she is the story.
Nell Tiger Free: Saint of “Absolutely Done With This”
This entire enterprise would fall apart without the right lead, and Nell Tiger Free absolutely nails it. Critics have singled her out for grounding all the insanity in something painfully human—grief, faith, trauma, and a dawning realization that your entire life has been grooming for Satan’s breeding program.
She starts as a hopeful, slightly naïve novice and ends as a blood-soaked, ferociously protective almost-mother who has literally given birth to the Antichrist and still somehow finds the strength to stab a Cardinal. That’s range. Her face does most of the film’s heavy lifting: every micro-flinch at Church hypocrisy, every crack in her faith, every moment she realizes oh, I am so cosmically screwed lands.
By the time she’s strapped to a hospital bed, forced into a nightmare C-section while a roomful of clerics coo over the “blessed” baby boy, you’re not just horrified—you’re furious on her behalf.
Arkasha Stevenson: Welcome to the Big League, Now Bleed
As a feature debut, this is absurdly confident. Arkasha Stevenson swings for the fences with a mix of gothic Catholic dread, ’70s political paranoia, and full-tilt body horror.
She clearly did her homework on the original—there are clever visual echoes and tonal nods—but she refuses to do a cosplay. Instead, she leans into:
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Paranoia: Margaret never knows which priest or nun she can trust, and neither do we.
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Institutional horror: the real evil isn’t some random demon; it’s the Church bureaucracy calmly planning ritual assault and global panic to goose attendance.
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Uncomfortable imagery: let’s just say the birthing and ritual scenes reportedly sparked friction with the ratings board, and you can see why.
The film’s best trick is that it doesn’t treat horror and theology as separate lanes. The conspiracy makes awful, chilling sense: a Church worried about secularism decides to engineer a living apocalypse baby so people will be scared back to the pews. “Faith through fear” as a literal business model. It’s almost too believable.
Body Horror With a Brain
You’ve probably already heard whispered warnings about one or two particularly gnarly sequences. The First Omendoesn’t just dabble in body horror; it pours Mark Korven’s shrieking score over it and holds the shot a beat too long.
But what keeps it from feeling edge-lordy is that the horror is always tied to women’s bodies and who owns them:
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Margaret’s disco blackout isn’t some random scare; it’s the night she’s ritually impregnated without her knowledge.
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Her pregnancy is hidden from her, then weaponized against her.
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Carlita is a living experiment, raised as a vessel rather than a person.
It’s exploitation about exploitation, which is a tightrope the film mostly walks. Even when it gets graphic, you understand exactly whose perspective it serves: Margaret’s. The violence isn’t titillating; it’s a thesis statement about how institutions—sacred or otherwise—treat women’s bodies as sacred only until they become useful.
Franchise Necromancy Done Right
Let’s be honest: horror prequels to ’70s classics are usually about as necessary as a third helping of communion wine before driving. But somehow, this one justifies its existence.
Critics have praised The First Omen for both expanding the lore and actually making the original Omen hit harder in retrospect, sketching in the machinery behind the casual baby swap that kicks off Damien’s story.
And the numbers back it up: with a critics’ score hovering around the high 70s/low 80s, it’s the best-reviewed entry in the franchise since 1976. For a sixth film in a series that’s included some truly dire sequels and a forgettable remake, that’s basically a resurrection.
It didn’t dominate the box office—about $54 million worldwide on a $30 million budget, nudged aside in part by another nuns-in-Italy horror release—but it did well enough, and more importantly, it gave this franchise something rarer than a subtle exorcism: critical respect.
Supporting Cast of Sin Merchants
Everyone around Nell Tiger Free seems to understand the assignment:
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Bill Nighy’s Cardinal Lawrence is so serenely evil he might as well be sponsored by incense and tax shelters. When he calmly explains a satanic breeding program like it’s a diocesan budget meeting, it’s somehow more horrifying than any jump scare.
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Ralph Ineson makes Father Brennan less a walking exposition dump and more a man fraying at the edges, desperate to stop a machine that’s been running longer than he has.
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Sônia Braga’s Abbess Silva glides through the orphanage like a benign dictator, and every smile feels like an accusation.
Even the cameos—Charles Dance, Rachel Hurd-Wood, the priest who will hand baby Damien to the Thorns—are handled with just enough restraint to feel like elegant connectors rather than fan-service pop-ups.
Faith, Fear, and One Very Doomed Baby
The ending has to thread a brutal needle: we know baby Damien must end up with the Thorns or the franchise collapses, but we also need Margaret’s story to feel like it means something. The film pulls off a bleak sort of miracle.
Margaret can’t bring herself to kill her son; she tries, fails, and nearly dies for it. The conspirators escape with the boy, gift him to diplomat Robert Thorn, and set the whole saga of the original in motion. Margaret survives, but only by retreating into mountain isolation with Carlita and her daughter, waiting for the Church’s pet Antichrist project to come looking.
It’s a rare horror prequel that respects the inevitability of its ending without feeling pointless. We already know the world is doomed; The First Omen just makes that doom feel more personal, more tragic, and frankly more the Church’s fault than ever.
Final Judgment
Is The First Omen perfect? No. The third act wobbles a bit under the weight of all the lore it’s trying to cram in, and if you’re squeamish about religious body horror, you might spend a chunk of the runtime communing with your popcorn instead of the screen.
But as a horror film, it’s tense, beautifully shot, and genuinely unsettling. As a franchise entry, it’s borderline miraculous. As an examination of faith, power, and weaponized childbirth, it’s mean, smart, and uncomfortably timely.
If nothing else, it proves one thing: in a world of lazy legacy sequels, sometimes the scariest thing you can do is take a dusty old devil-baby and actually care about the woman who had to bring him into the world.
