The First Omen (2024)

Arkasha Stevenson's feature debut arrives as a prequel to a franchise that began in 1976, and it carries that inheritance with a certain grim dignity. The setting is Rome, 1971, where political protests rumble in the streets and an American novice named Margaret is delivered to an orphanage to be quietly used. The conspiracy she uncovers involves forced impregnation, a satanic ritual she cannot recall, and a cabal of churchmen who wish to engineer the Antichrist because secularism has eroded their authority. This is genre machinery, well oiled and familiar, and the film does not pretend otherwise.

Where the picture acquires its charge is in the treatment of the female body as contested territory. The horror is institutional as much as supernatural: a woman reduced to a vessel by men who believe the ends justify the violation. Critics, writing in the wake of Roe's reversal, placed the film alongside Immaculate and read both as responses to religious law encroaching on bodily agency. The producer complained of a ratings double standard for female body horror, a grievance that has become part of the film's reception. This is thematic resonance, not sermonizing, and the film mostly resists the urge to lecture from the pulpit it depicts.

The cast is international in a way that reflects the Roman setting more than any deliberate statement, and the film engages no racial, environmental, or class concerns worth cataloguing. Body horror of this kind offers no comfort about the body, and no neurodivergent or historical-revisionist agenda surfaces across its runtime. What remains is a handsomely mounted exercise in ecclesiastical dread, competent, occasionally striking, and content to work within boundaries set half a century ago by a better film with a smaller budget and fewer bishops in supporting roles. It is a prequel, and it behaves like one: dutiful, atmospheric, and forever glancing backward at the thing it was built to precede. The viewer leaves unsettled, though chiefly by the realization that the franchise will continue regardless of anyone's consent, including ours. That, at least, is thematically consistent.

Here the classification concludes, without enthusiasm but without malice, as all classifications must. It is a horror film about a church that wants a baby and a woman who does not want to give it one. The rest is marketing, and the marketing is competent. The scorecard is closed. The verdict, such as it is, stands.

The final assessment, rendered with the weariness such labor demands, is that the film knows precisely what it is and declines to apologize for it. That is more than most of its franchise siblings can claim, and considerably less than its most ardent defenders insist. The gavel falls. We move on to the next screening, and the next, until the projectionist finally goes home. It is a living, or at least a serviceable, exercise in the form. The End, which is also, inevitably, a beginning.