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THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER

HELL HATH NO FURY LIKE A WOMAN SCORNED



★★★★★ (A Must-See)

Director: Oz Perkins

2015


At an isolated Catholic boarding school for girls, Kat (Kiernan Shipka) is the friendless, mousy student people tend to ignore. Even when she’s skillfully playing piano at a recital, the audience is bored. After Kat’s parents fail to pick her up when school lets out for a winter holiday—emptying the rooms and hallways—a popular older girl (Rose) and the priest in charge have better things to do than watch the girl. We know this level of neglect in real life can lead to cults or becoming a serial killer or influencer, but what will it do to Kat? There are multiple themes in this film, such as mental illness, but the one that stands out to me has to do with children being left to their own devices, ripe for the picking. In Fulci’s Don’t Torture a Duckling, we see the same actions with different consequences. If a child doesn’t get attention from you, they will get it from someone else.



If you want jump scares or screaming violins, you won’t find them here. The Blackcoat’s Daughter is a cousin to The Exorcist, The Witch, and Rosemary’s Baby, an excellent offering in a family of quiet horror movies so disturbing you’ll glance in closets and under your bed before you go to sleep. It requires the audience to put together a puzzle, and once we finally have the pieces in place, we’re shown the naked violence. Because the wonderfully hollow score by director Oz Perkins’ brother (Elvis Perkins) is used sparingly, we hear every slice of the knife, every footstep. We are in the room when it happens. I want to focus on the score for a moment. It veers between a chirping innocence and the sound of someone opening a door in your empty home. The brothers two collaborations (The Blackcoat’s Daughter, I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House) are a perfect marriage of minds. I hope to see more from this pairing in the future.


As the wind howls across the frozen campus, Kat begs older classmate Rose (Lucy Boynton) not to leave her alone, but the teen has plans to hang out with a boyfriend. The two nuns left on the property scold Kat for acting out afterwards, but Rose—now trapped by the snow—is slowly becoming alarmed by her predicament. Now there are four.


Kiernan Shipka thrills as Kat; when a camera is on her, she’s all you see. Though playing a pivotal character, Lucy Boynton is mostly in the background, overshadowed by Shipka’s trance. Though we empathize with Rose as we empathize with every character in this film at least once, she feels like the cardboard cut-out of a cool girl in trouble. Emma Roberts gives her best performance to date as Joan, a strange young woman we don’t understand. The Blackcoat’s Daughter moves between the story of Kat and Rose and that of Joan who has befriended an older man and his wife. One of our puzzles is having to figure out what these characters have in common.


Oz Perkins is a master at building tension in a scene by using what pieces we’ve put together as weapons. He has the steady hand of David Lynch and the eyes of Jacques Tourneur (Cat People, 1942)—what you don’t see is what’s frightening. In the end, after such shocking violence, watching a girl cry by the road is more unsettling than a thousand jump scares. The Blackcoat’s Daughter is not a movie that should be ignored.





GENRES: Atmospheric, Feminist-Friendly, Psychological


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