5 Questions I Still Have After Seeing 'The First Omen'
5 Questions I Still Have After Seeing 'The First Omen'
I'm having a devil of a time with this movie.
[Spoilers ahead for The First Omen]
Last week I saw The First Omen, and while I thought the film was beautifully shot with some gorgeous production design, I also found the script to be pretty stupid. To the film’s credit, it’s never boring, but it’s also a movie that starts falling apart in the middle of its own narrative. Days later, I’m still trying to figure out out some of the story’s choices, such as…
Why Ask Paolo to Check if Margaret Had the Mark of the Beast?
Part of why the film fails is that it’s resting on an obvious reveal with a clumsy misdirect. For the first two thirds of the movie, we’re meant to believe that Margaret (Nell Tiger Free), our protagonist and a novice at the convent, is looking for who could be the mother of the antichrist. She thinks she has found her with the young Carlita Scianna (Nicole Sorace), a troubled girl who draws disturbing images. But twist! They’re both offspring of the devil, and it’s actually Margaret that the bad guys have wanted this entire time. Cardinal Lawrence (Bill Nighy) tells Margaret as much when he says he’s watched over her for her entire life.
So why did the Bad Catholics (the ones who want to bring forth the antichrist) need to ask some hapless stooge like Paolo (Andrea Arcangeli) to check if she had the mark of the beast (the three sixes birthmark)? They have a file on Margaret and they’ve followed her throughout her life, and she’s now literally working in their convent where they could easily monitor her. Why hire some rando off the street and tell him, “Hey, we need you to hit on this specific girl, and when you’re dancing with her in a club with poor lighting, get a real good look at her scalp to see if there’s the mark of the beast.” If Margaret’s roommate and fellow novice Luz (Maria Caballero) was in on the Bad Catholics’ plan the entire time, couldn’t she have found a way to check Margaret at their apartment?
What Is Sister Anjelica’s Deal?
Soon after arriving at the convent, Margaret runs across Sister Anjelica (Ishtar Currie Wilson), whose defining characteristic is that she’s weird. She’s meant to be kind of spooky and foreboding, but her behavior is never explained. At one point, she’s seen getting close to Carlita—but soon after, Anjelica is standing on a ledge saying, “It’s all for you,” (a callback to the 1976 original) and then both hangs herself and sets herself on fire (I guess to show that she’s even more devoted than the nanny from the 1976 movie). At least the original 1976 Omen hints that bad things are happening because Damien, the antichrist, is already in the world, and they’re going to get worse. But in this film…is fetal Damien causing all of these things to happen? Did fetal Damien speak to Sister Anjelica at the convent? Sister Anjelica seems to only exist as a slight misdirect before dying as a way to create a horror moment/callback, as we only get a vision of her charred corpse later in the movie with no explanation as to why she behaved so oddly in the first place.
Why Didn’t the Bad Catholics Kill Father Brennan After the Car Accident?
Father Brennan (Ralph Ineson) explains to Margaret that there’s a good Catholic Church and a Bad Catholic Church. The Bad Catholic Church wants to bring forth the antichrist because it will cause people to return to the faith if they see the antichrist out in the world. We also see that the Bad Catholics will go to any length to achieve their goals, which includes burning down the convent/orphanage to destroy all evidence of their deeds. To be extremely charitable, before they burned down the building, they assumed that Luz had stabbed Margaret to death, so there was no need to check her body. Leaving Margaret alive was an understandable oversight.
However, earlier in the film, they are able to capture Margaret because they rammed her car. The driver clearly dies, and it looks like the other two passengers, Father Brennan and Father Gabriel (Tawfeek Barhom), are either dead or unconscious. I assumed they were both dead, but then in the final scene, Father Brennan shows up at Margaret’s remote cabin to tell her that her child is alive and the couple who adopted the baby named it “Damien.”1 So did the Bad Catholics see two guys unconscious in a car and think, “You know what? Probably dead,” and move on? They were so adamant about not leaving a trail they burned down their entire building, flew to the U.S. with a newborn infant to swap with the child of an American diplomat at the exact moment that the diplomat’s child was born, but left caution to the wind when it came to a guy who knew their entire evil scheme?
Do the Bad Catholics Keep the Jackal Hanging Out Between Ceremonies?
When the Bad Catholics burn down the convent, we see in the basement they’ve kept the Jackal behind a curtain. The Jackal is the beast that impregnates the devil’s children to bring forth the antichrist. But when they burn down the convent, the Jackal catches on fire as well, so it’s not like he’s summoned up for ceremonies and then goes back to Hell in between. So what happens between ceremonies? Does the Jackal just hang out in the spooky basement behind the curtain? Do they give him something to read? Is he like an on-call impregnator because so many of the devil’s daughters are coming by the convent?
How Do the Bad Catholics See Themselves?
Setting aside that the Bad Catholics’ plan to bring forth the antichrist to bring people back to Catholicism is an incredibly dumb plan (wouldn’t doing a bunch of good deeds to bring back Jesus also get the job done if your goal here is to serve Christianity), do the Bad Catholics think they’re bad? We’re told that they’re serving the goal of bringing people back to Christianity, but when it’s time for the birthing ceremony, they’re all in special black robes. Did they make the robes themselves? Why do you need evil robes in this situation if you think you’re doing the right thing?
Also, how long has this plan been around? The paintings in the dungeon/basement imply that this has been planned for hundreds of years, but the files only go back to roughly the mid-20th century. Were they just willy-nilly trying to make antichrists, and then one of the Bad Catholics said, “Look, just because we’re making an abomination, that doesn’t mean we have to be disorganized about it,” and instituted a filing system? Also, at what point did the Bad Catholics think, “We need the antichrist?” When did it get so bad that they thought, “We need our Hail Mary play, and that Hail Mary play is summoning the antichrist.” Presumably something like the Crusades were fine, but then the Catholic Counter-Reformation didn’t go far enough? Did Vatican II come along and the Bad Catholics took solace in knowing they had an antichrist plan going? The particulars here confound me.
If I were trying to keep my clandestine plot to bring forth the antichrist a secret, I would have been a little surprised that the couple who adopted him named him something that sounds like “demon.”