120 min | R | April 5, 2024 | 20th Century Studios
A prequel to The Omen that has no business being this good. Nell Tiger Free carries a horror film about institutional evil and forced motherhood with ferocious commitment.
Margaret is a young American woman sent to Rome to take her vows and work at an orphanage run by the Catholic Church. The children are troubled. The nuns are secretive. Something is wrong with a girl named Carlita. Margaret starts asking questions and discovers a conspiracy within the Church to manufacture the birth of the Antichrist. The film is a prequel to the 1976 Omen and it takes that mythology and builds something that feels genuinely dangerous. Prequels are usually unnecessary. This one earns its existence.
Nell Tiger Free plays Margaret with a performance that escalates from earnest faith to primal terror. She is remarkable. The film puts her body through ordeals that are difficult to watch and she commits to every moment without reservation. The birth sequence is one of the most visceral scenes in recent horror. Bill Nighy plays a cardinal with institutional smoothness that masks complicity. Ralph Ineson plays a priest with gravelly authority. Sonia Braga plays the Mother Superior with warmth that becomes menacing. The cast treats the material with the seriousness it demands.
Arkasha Stevenson directs her first feature with a visual sophistication that channels 1970s Italian horror. The Rome locations are shot with golden decay. The orphanage sequences draw from Suspiria and The Exorcist without imitating them. The film earns its R rating through body horror that is purposeful rather than gratuitous. The sound design is oppressive. Stevenson understands that the scariest thing about The Omen mythology is not the devil. It is the institution that serves him.
The film is about what the Church does to women’s bodies in the name of divine will. That subtext is not subtle and it does not need to be. Stevenson makes a horror film that connects religious institutional control to bodily autonomy with clarity and fury. The Omen franchise was dormant for good reason. This film resurrects it with purpose.