The Blackcoat's Daughter

The Blackcoat's Daughter

Starring Kiernan Shipka, Lucy Boynton, Emma Roberts, Lauren Holly

Directed by Oz Perkins

The Story:
At a Catholic boarding school, all the students go home for break except for wild child Rose (Lucy Boynton), and social outcast Kat (Kiernan Shipka), because their parents haven't arrived yet.  Kat fears her parents dead, while Rose told her parents to pick her up later so she can see her boyfriend again.  Together with two nuns they spend their time at the school while an evil entity lies in the shadows, threatening all of them.  Meanwhile, mysterious Joan (Emma Roberts) arrives at a bus station when she's picked up by married couple Bill (James Remar) and Linda (Lauren Holly), and their story has deep ties to what is happening at the school.

The Synopsis:
I absolutely love horror movies, and I really enjoy them when they're more than just a simple slash-and-kill motif.  When a horror film can transform itself into a thriller and serious dramatic piece, that's the sign of something truly wonderful - if it can be pulled off right.  Oz Perkins (the son of Anthony Perkins, who's most famous for starring as Norman Bates in the Alfred Hitchcock classic "Psycho") writes and directs a horror film that perfectly imbues aspects of drama as well as horror to deliver a well-rounded product that's more than just a simple possession movie, but also the inability to recover from loss.

The film focuses on three girls, and the horrors that haunt them both in the physical and in their own psyche.  Purposefully, Perkins doesn't deliver too much development on these characters so as to draw the viewer in much deeper, allowing us to view a continuous mystery that slowly unravels like a spool of thread, leaving us to view the film again to connect all the dots - and it's a film where we don't mind watching it again due to the continual sense of dread and danger, and the evil that comes from within.

Kiernan Shipka stars as Kat, the typical "strange girl" you see in movies such as this.  The film opens with a nightmare she has about her parents dying in a car crash, and then her parents don't arrive to pick her up.  She's tormented by the fear that her parents have indeed died, and it's her inability to deal with this possibility that creates the most tension in the film.  Shipka delivers a solid performance here, as she mixes both innocence and strength in equal measure, giving birth to the most compelling character in the film.

Lucy Boynton stars as Rose, the "bad girl" such as it was.  She finds out she might be pregnant (which is an obvious no-no at a Catholic school), and lies to her parents about picking her up so she can talk to her boyfriend about it.  Her own life about to change drastically, she undergoes a transformation of sorts as well, emerging as someone more than just a simple trope of bad girl, but also revealing a sensitive, nurturing side as well.

Emma Roberts stars as Joan, the "mysterious girl" in the film.  She seems to have the least amount of connection to the main story, as we find her coming off a bus at a station far removed from the school.  She doesn't talk much, and we see through flashbacks events that happened in her life before she's picked up by married couple Bill and Linda, who are on their own trek of discovery.  Roberts is not one of my most favorite actresses (due mostly to her notorious behind-the-set antics), but she gives Joan a compelling story and does a great job delivering a performance using very little words.

Without giving anything away, the connection these three characters share is something bigger than you'd first expect, which again will lead you to re-watch the film so you can pick up on the small hints the film drops that lead to the stunning conclusion.  It's a slow burn of a film, but heralded by these three ladies, you're instantly drawn in from the first frame to the last as you play detective in hopes of finding out what is really happening at this school.

Oz Perkins doesn't just cast great stars, but he utilizes every other aspect of cinematography to their peak.  The setting is as remote as you can get - a boarding school in the middle of a break, where only four people walk the formerly crowded halls, gives a deeper sense of dread than you'd expect in a more suburban setting.  The use of greys and dark tones (especially the fact that it takes place in February, where there's not a lot of sunlight and each scene is practically covered in blankets of snow) add to the sense of dread.  Finally the music score is unrelenting and unnerving, with piercing strings of violins and other monotonous tones that keep us enthralled in the story at hand.

The Summary:
Blending horror and drama, Oz Perkins channels the late Alfred Hitchcock in a film that he would undoubtedly favor, delivering a slow burn film with three strong performances and a truly terrifying tale.

The Score: A+