The best thing to be said about The Blackcoat’s Daughter is that it’s unconventional. The worst thing is that, for a horror film, it’s neither scary nor creepy. Writer/director Osgood [Oz] Perkins [the son of Psycho star Anthony Perkins], making his directorial debut, opts for a slow-burn approach and, while that emphasizes atmosphere, it engenders a certain degree of impatience. The narrative’s elliptical approach demands attention. The movie is a puzzle whose picture doesn’t snap into focus until the final piece is in place. Even then, The Blackcoat’s Daughter may require a second viewing for the fuzziness to dissipate. There are times when the movie feels stilted; characters are half-formed and not entirely believable. That is at least in part due to the filmmakers’ decisions about structure and, in hindsight, they may be the right choices.
This may be one of those instances when a film’s on-demand streaming accessibility is an asset because watching The Blackcoat’s Daughter a second time is a more rewarding experience than the first time through. Although it’s true that the surprises will have been spoiled by the first viewing, those things are ultimately secondarily to the story Perkins is telling. Once the viewer understands how the three primary characters relate to one another, it’s easier to follow their evolution.
The Blackcoat’s Daughter opens in familiar territory for a horror/exploitation film. It’s February at Bramford Academy, an all-girls Catholic boarding school in upstate New York. Two girls, worldly Rose [Lucy Boynton] and quiet Kat [Kiernan Shipka], are alone during a week-long break, their parents having failed to pick them up. The place is inhospitable with so few people around. Although Rose is told by the headmaster to “look after” Kat, the older girl has problems of her own – she suspects she’s pregnant and has to inform her boyfriend and make arrangements for an abortion. Kat, meanwhile, has been experiencing unsettling dreams that predict her parents’ deaths.
Although The Blackcoat’s Daughter lacks traditional scares, it comes complete with some big shocks. These aren’t the garden-variety jump-scares that have come to infiltrate horror films; instead, they’re narrative-based, indicating that viewers shouldn’t become too comfortable with the direction in which they think the story is going. It all makes sense in the end but, as events are unfolding, things can seem haphazard. Although the plots are completely dissimilar, I was reminded of aspects of Pulp Fiction’s structure in the way this movie unfolds.
The film’s writer/director, Oz Perkins, technically made his feature debut with The Blackcoat’s Daughter, although the movie was released after Perkin’s second film, I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House. Perkins entered the industry as an actor, appearing as a young Norman Bates in Psycho II. After that, he took only roles in front of the camera [and sparingly, at least at first] for the next 30 years. His work here is assured, making it surprising that he has done so few projects in the last eight years [although the pandemic may have had something to do with that]. The Blackcoat’s Daughter doesn’t look like a first film. Some genre fans may feel cheated by the lack of overt gore [there is some but, although it's explicit enough to have warranted an R-rating, it falls considerably short of the graphic bloodletting of slasher films], the unhurried pace, and the lack of many horror tropes, but the movie isn’t a carbon copy of every other “demon possession” movie out there.
Osgood, or Oz, Perkins’ The Blackcoat’s Daughter is a bit of a gem, a film apparently released elsewhere under the title February. Perkins does a great job cutting from different timeframes and points of view rather fluidly and in the end, makes for both a satisfying supernatural horror film.
Note: From here on, this review contains plot SPOILERS so readers please beware.
The movie is set along two different paths. The first, and primary one, involves schoolgirls Kat [KIERNAN SHIPKA], a freshman, and Rose [LUCY BOYNTON], a senior, both stuck at their all-girl private school over break after their parents failed to pick them up, though Rose intentially told her parents another day as she deals with her boyfriend. Stuck together, with Rose put in charge of, more or less, babysitting Kat, the strange begins to happen.
The other storyline involves Joan [EMMA ROBERTS], a young woman on the road who is befriended by Bill [JAMES REMAR] who offers a ride to Joan, much to the displeasure of his wife Linda [LAUREN HOLLY]. Bill and Joan lost their daughter years earlier and this is apparently a frequent occurrence of Bill helping waywards who remind him of her.
These two plots intercut with one another as the puzzle pieces begin to come together as to how these characters are related and interspersed with some truly creepy scenes that I actually found more effective than a movie that garnered much critical praise last year, The Witch.
The performance from Kiernan Shipka is fantastic, not unlike Anya Taylor-Joy, being able to balance sensitivity/vulnerability, sadness and utter creepiness in the span of not just the entire movie, but within a scene. Lucy Boynton also has some good scenes opposite Shipka and seems to have the opposite character change to Kat; and Emma Roberts at first was fairly generic before turning up the emotions once the two storylines come together. And not to be outdone, James Remar and Lauren Holly were decent enough in rather thin, yet quite important, roles.
The Blackcoat’s Daughter marks Oz Perkins, son of legendary actor Anthony Perkins, feature film debut and what an introduction it is. Although some might find the cuts jarring, revisiting some scenes from different perspectives, I found them mostly efficient in outlaying what, at its core, is probably a simple story. Pair the unique story structure with some beautiful shots, under lens of cinematographer Julie Kirkwood and some interesting choices in lighting [as Perkins discusses in his commentary], and you have a really effective little supernatural horror-thriller.