Top nun…
★★★★☆
OUT NOW CINEMAS
It’s a nun-derful life at the cinema these days. You wait years for a sister-and-Satan movie, and The Nun II and Immaculate materialise. But this smartly chilling, 70s-styled revisit to the Omen franchise is a cut above.
A classy prequel shot with understated atmosphere, The First Omen propels naive novitiate Margaret (Nell Tiger Free) into a creepy Catholic orphanage in 1971 Rome, where she bonds with disturbed orphan Carlita (Nicole Sorace) over their abusive childhoods.
First-time feature director Arkasha Stevenson (Channel Zero) sets a tense, chilling mood, bringing back the psychological horror of the 1976 film. This gives Margaret’s visions of devil claws and mysterious bestial rites a useful ambiguity – is she relapsing into mental instability, as Sonia Braga’s shrewd abbess insists? But when disgraced Father Brennan (Ralph Ineson) reveals a Catholic sect’s plan to breed the Antichrist from an orphan, the rope-swinging, pole-flying callbacks to The Omen ramp up the film from arty restraint to burgeoning body horror.
Stevenson crafts something female-driven and fresh from the film’s heritage, as Margaret digs into orphanage files (and its terrifying crypt) in a bid to save Carlita. Like Immaculate, there’s a strong message about post-Roe-vs-Wade female bodily autonomy, especially in the gory, feisty finale. Free’s fabulously no-holds-barred performance keeps things swinging along in high style.
THE VERDICT This female-centred Omen prequel is devilishly good at keeping its nun on the run.
OMEN (AUGURE) 15
★★★☆☆ OUT 26 APRIL CINEMAS
Belgian-Congolese rapper Baloji directs this unusual examination of characters all accused of witchcraft and sorcery. The first is Koffi (Marc Zinga), who returns to DR Congo with his white fiancée Alice (Lucie Debay) to reunite with his estranged family. What follows is an increasingly bizarre and fractured narrative, as Baloji examines the tensions between modernity and ancient traditions. Visually it’s splendidly unsettling, but the film’s anthology-like nature – as Koffi’s sister and mother enter the fray, alongside young local Paco (Marcel Otete Kabeya) – loses focus at crucial times.
THAT THEY MAY FACE THE RISING SUN 15
★★★☆☆ OUT 26 APRIL CINEMAS
Rural Ireland is both the setting and the subject of Pat Collins’ contemplative adaptation of John McGahern’s award-winning novel, a film that studiously takes its time as it charts a year in the lives of a writer (Barry Ward) and an artist (Anna Bederke) who have left London in search of a more peaceful existence as part of a lakeside community. The wed
