Harefooted Halloween: The First Omen

What I Liked: When this came out buzz was flying around about Nell Tiger Free’s (Game of Thrones) lead performance and yea, she’s excellent.  It takes a while for things to really get going so in the beginning she comes across affable and a bit naïve maybe but nothing too heavy or special.  It’s when shit amps up in the third act that Free goes all out in being terrorized, traumatized and brutalized by Satan and his summoners.  The sheer physicality she puts her body through and the look of absolute horror on her face at times is astonishing.  Of course the big scene is the homage to the freakout in Possession which is a damn hard task to take on but remarkably Free rises to the challenge.

Interestingly what steals the movie for me is the cinematography (Aaron Morton (Evil Dead (2013), Our Flag Means Death)).  It’s pretty to look at with a mostly locked down camera that also somehow feels floaty.  There’s a sense that you’re gliding through the film and that nothing is completely solid, if that makes any sense.  The techniques used don’t come across show-offy either, just very confident.

What I Didn’t Like: Overall the story is fine, good even, but the first two thirds of the movie are a bit slow.  Things play out like a boiler plate ghost/demon picture with the protagonist seeing weird images or thinking creepy things are attacking her for a moment and so on.  And it’s all punctuated by lame ass dumb ass jump scares.  It’s frustrating because the elegance of the cinematography makes it seem like the film should be above that shit.

The title is strangely literal.  Going into this I thought “so there was another devil boy before Damien?”  Nope.  They’re saying “this is your starting point in the Omen series, this is what happened directly before the original.”  A generic subtitle like “Abomination” or “666” would’ve been terrible though, so at least that didn’t happen.  At the same time what they went with is lazy in its own way.

Overall Impressions: This is alright.  For a part 5 you could certainly do a lot worse.  Honestly, the script is kinda mediocre where I always felt I was one step ahead of it, but the execution is way better than what you would normally see.  Director Arkasha Stevenson does a bang up job here on her first big feature where you can tell she put a lot of care and effort into what should’ve been a throwaway cash grab.  I have to believe that her being a woman brought a fresh perspective to the franchise too.  Like even in a universe where a healthy young woman is absolutely crucial for the devil and his followers’ scheme to succeed she still gets treated like total crap.  I’m very curious to see what Stevenson does next.

So this film is a mixed bag with the first two acts feeling like something out of the dreadful The Conjuring pictures and the much better last act being a combination of The Omen, Rosemary’s Baby and Possession.  With that said I think it’s easily the best Omen sequel.  Parts 2-4 all follow the same formula as the first with folks catching on to Damien being the Anti-Christ and then Damien killing them before they can inform the rest of the world.  This one takes a completely different approach by digging into the backstory of the religious group that wants the devil to walk the Earth.  The filmmakers do some retconning, which may or may not annoy you but it didn’t bother me, and they actually leave the door open for a sequel.  I have no idea where you go from here but I guess I could do another one.