The First Omen review – stylish horror prequel is damned by its franchise

We didn’t need a prequel to landmark 1976 horror The Omen but we’d have been foolish not to expect one. The major genre films of that era – Halloween, The Exorcist, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Alien, Suspiria – have all seen a new round of remakes, reboots and remixes in the last few years – some tolerable, most not – and so another Damien chapter is as inevitable as the rise of Damien himself.

Related: Immaculate review – Sydney Sweeney plays scream queen in gory nun horror

It’s not the first time anyone has tried either. After the series sputtered out in 1991 with the cheapo gender-swapped TV movie Omen IV: The Awakening, the films went the way of most horror during that decade and it took until 2006, a time of anything-goes, mostly gutter-level remakes, for the sixes to align once again. It was a slickly made yet utterly soulless retread (released on 6 June of course) and it took another decade for the obvious small-screen demotion, with one-season dud Damien, following the problem child as he became a problem adult. Now we’re going way back to where it all began with The First Omen, announced back in 2016 with Christine’s Antonio Campos intriguingly attached, and now arriving without him but with the question that we ask ourselves every time Hollywood double dips: do we really need to be back here?

Surprisingly, it seems for a while that we actually maybe do? Crafted with more flair and written with more thought than the majority of studio horror films are at this current rotten moment, The First Omen charges out of the gate to rise above an admittedly low bar with all the confidence of an original. Like the bold, backwards trailer that’s being used to promote it, it’s far more artful and striking than it has any right to be, thanks in overwhelmingly large part to the TV director Arkasha Stevenson, whose bravado works incredibly well until it really doesn’t, when she’s forced to play by franchise rules rather than her own.

The story takes us back to 1971 as bright-eyed American Margaret (the Game of Thrones alum Nell Tiger Free) lands in Rome to begin a life of religious service. She’s immediately in awe of her idyllic surroundings and prepared to give herself to her god but there’s something awry. Margaret has noticed an othering of one of the girls, whose visions remind her of those she used to have, and the further she investigates what might be going on, the more she realises that something unholy is at play.

Given that most of us know of where and how Richard Donner’s original begins, it’s clear that a baby is on the way and right from a ghoulish early scene, Stevenson effectively maximises the body horror of childbirth. She has a keen eye for the grotesque, knowing how to burrow her way under the skin and pushes up against the limits of how far we expect a mainstream film such as this to go (there’s an effectively unsettling Possession homage that is one of many images that shall linger). It’s not all gory provocation though with her script, co-written by Tim Smith and Keith Thomas (almost making up for his hideous Firestarter remake), cleverly finding a new way into the old story and unlike so many other horror films about the devil, it’s not as shamelessly evangelical as we’ve come to expect (there’s a reason why the God-fearing Conjuring movies made so much money in the US). Religious fanaticism is as much of a danger as satanism here, a prodding throughline that puts the film into an interesting conversation with last month’s other nun-led horror Immaculate, also laying blame at the foot of the cross.

The Omen was released at a time when studio horror films were just as extravagant and cinematic as any other genre and Stevenson has followed in that tradition over much of the artless tack of today, her film as sumptuous and specific with its 70s recreation as any prestige-y drama might be. But it’s when the shadow of that film truly comes into view that things go downhill in a last act of obvious reveals and clumsy pretzeling, a film somewhat of its own forced to align itself with a franchise. It’s a messy bow on top of an otherwise pristinely wrapped gift, the final scene so distractingly bad it feels like the result of test audience meddling one can almost sense the moment that Stevenson handed back reins to the studio. The conclusion suggests that it may not be the last Omen but I’m far more interested to see what Stevenson can do next instead, allowed to fully step out of the shadow of what came before.

• The First Omen is out in cinemas on 5 April