phancy.com - horror reviews - MOH 2024

The First Omen



IMDb Info

Release Year: 2024
Runtime: 1h 59m
Country: USA, Italy, Serbia, Canada
Language: English, Italian
Genre Tags: Horror
Plot Summary: A young American woman is sent to Rome to begin a life of service to the church, but encounters a darkness that causes her to question her faith and uncovers a terrifying conspiracy that hopes to bring about the birth of evil incarnate.

Poster - Title Card


phancy.com rating:

phancy.com notes: Possibly better than the original Omen. Assured writing and direction, excellent devilish imagery, great cast. A pervasive, unsettling mood that straddles the fine line between grounded and over-the-top. Ultimately more like Rosemary's Baby than The Omen. Sure, there's the good, old Catholic terror, but it's really about women being used in any number of horrible ways to further the means of men, and men supported by other women who have bought into the cause. This movie is a beautfully horrible tragedy.


Outside Reviews:

Tomris Laffly
3.5 out of 4 stars - rogerebert.com

The most exciting thing about “The First Omen” is how Stevenson is an evident scholar of the supernatural horror genre, unmercifully playing with our perception and orchestrating an escalating sense of paranoia with ease. In that, rather than unsettling the audience with subtle, suggestive scares and overloading the story with trauma-based angles (a trap many of the recent genre outings sadly fall into), she gives us a first-rate motion picture in the old-school way: smartly agile, elegantly filmed and damn scary, with a stunning period production design and costuming, as well as touches of Neorealist mis-en-scène as immersive as they come.


Matthew Jackson
B+ - A horror prequel done (mostly) right

Then there’s Stevenson’s direction, which is at once witty and decidedly wicked in its pacing and ability to toy with our expectations. The film’s opening kill will remind you instantly of similar deaths in The Omen, but just when you think you know exactly how the hammer’s going to fall, Stevenson finds a new way to make your stomach churn and your skin crawl, and that carries through to the rest of the film. It’s a movie that delivers the prequel goods—complete with a pleasant ‘70s throwback style that will surely please retro horror buffs—while also playing with our expectations of what this particular prequel will look like and expanding the world of The Omen in ways that future sequels could wield with ease.