In the Flesh: The First Omen

A few lines of dialogue that ring a little tin-eared. A final sequence which, while not bad, exists solely to tie things into a franchise. Aside from these minor and fleeting imperfections, Arkasha Stevenson’s directorial debut is a veritable great white shark of a movie, a ton and change of teeth and savage muscle ripping into anything it can get at, the very definition of all killer, no filler. A pipe crashing end-first through a stained-glass window like the Lance of Longinus, a burning nun swinging from the end of a noose like a grotesque church bell tolling the hour, a man pinned against a wall by a runaway truck, whispering “I’m stuck” again and again as his innards slide out of him like newborn serpents. Any one of these could be the centerpiece crisis image in a lesser but still good horror flick, but Stevenson unloads them all on you like she’s trying to breach your castle walls and get her claws on your soul. Again and again we’re smacked with a huge, unmissable image of monstrosity that leaves us open to the intimate terrors of the convent and its inhabitants. 

And man, once it makes that opening (no pun intended), The First Omen doesn’t waste a second immersing you in its cloistered, menacing, but not at all single-note world. You get a real sense, watching outsider Margaret (Nell Tiger Free) joke and laugh with her beautiful, confident roommate, Luz (Maria Caballero), and the other sisters as they peel potatoes that this life is something it makes sense to want. There’s belonging here, and kindness, and a sense of self. The children seem, in the main, happy and playful. The older nuns are earthy, practical, and indulgent toward their younger counterparts. It helps that from the first shot to the last, everything cinematographer Aaron Morton does is pretty much beyond reproach. No blue-orange prestige gunk here. Instead we’re inundated with grays and tans, blacks and creams, all lovingly saturated to the point that it feels like you’re meandering through a Goya painting, light and shadow sliding over skin and lovingly worn fabric. The attention to set dressing is likewise unimpeachable, making it easy to slide right into the fiction.

The political anxieties animating The First Omen are likewise complex and engrossing, from frankly terrifying pregnancy horror complete with Nell Tiger Free going full Adjani-in-Possession and actually, miraculously landing it to Father Brennan’s (Ralph Ineson) crushing insight about the church’s stupid, animal greed and bottomless hunger for power for its own sake. It steps past other, similar critiques to show us a church so consumed with its own perpetuation for no reason other than self-aggrandizement and personal security that it comes off as much nastier and less honest than the actual, literal demon it uses to rape young women in hopes of spawning an antichrist to scare the world’s asses back into the pews. Free is dynamite in the lead role, a young Winona Ryder but with a strained, uneasy edge all her own, and the supporting cast is top to bottom brilliant. The First Omen is ruthless and thrilling, teasing you with horrors and then opening up its habit to show you something so awful you’re sorry you were ever curious.