The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015)
Sep. 20th, 2020 11:37 pmMovie: The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015), directed by Osgood Perkins 
Here’s the very first thing I need to tell you about The Blackcoat’s Daughter: if you haven’t seen it, and you tend to like slower-paced, atmospheric horror that maybe messes with your mind a bit, you should stop reading right now and come back after you’ve watched it. Seriously. It’s the kind of movie that is sooooo much better if you know absolutely nothing about it going in. I wound up starting my run late and didn’t have time to make a considered choice about what movie to watch, so I just clicked on The Blackcoat’s Daughter based on nothing more than it was in the horror section and I liked the sound of its name. I literally did not even read the description—and I’m thrilled, because that was definitely the best way to watch it.
Watched on: Netflix
Ran: 7.17 miles, 8’27”/mile, 01:00:41 (recovery run)
Here’s the very first thing I need to tell you about The Blackcoat’s Daughter: if you haven’t seen it, and you tend to like slower-paced, atmospheric horror that maybe messes with your mind a bit, you should stop reading right now and come back after you’ve watched it. Seriously. It’s the kind of movie that is sooooo much better if you know absolutely nothing about it going in. I wound up starting my run late and didn’t have time to make a considered choice about what movie to watch, so I just clicked on The Blackcoat’s Daughter based on nothing more than it was in the horror section and I liked the sound of its name. I literally did not even read the description—and I’m thrilled, because that was definitely the best way to watch it.So I’m going to assume that from here on out you’ve either seen the movie or you don’t really care, and therefore it’s safe for me to proceed. Cool? Awesome.
The Blackcoat’s Daughter begins as a story of two girls at a Catholic boarding school that is about to close for February vacation. Kat and Rose are the only two whose parents have not come to pick them up; Kat, a lonely first-year who seems a little “off” (played perfectly by Kiernan Shipka), has had disturbing dreams of a car crash and is clearly worried, but Rose gave her parents the wrong pick-up date on purpose, so she could be alone to meet her boyfriend in secret and deal with a pregnancy scare. The girls will have to remain at the school with two nuns until their parents arrive. Kat seeks comfort from Rose, but Rose has her own problems to handle—and when she returns from sneaking out, she finds Kat in the boiler room acting odd. Indeed, Kat gets progressively stranger through the night and following morning—she can’t say grace, she swears at the nuns. And then everything really goes to hell.
But wait, because interwoven with the Kat-and-Rose tale there’s also a sickly-looking woman named Joan shivering outside a bus terminal, when a kindly middle-aged dad-type takes pity on her and offers her a ride to a town not far from his and his wife’s destination: the boarding school. The man gets Joan a hotel room so she can rest and clean up, and buys her food; he says he’s being kind to her because she reminds him of his daughter, whom he hasn’t seen in a long time. They suddenly need to get on the road right away to beat an approaching storm. Joan’s in the back seat with a knife she swiped at dinner. And then everything ALSO goes to hell.
So much for the setup, which, when set out like this, isn’t anything to write home about—but the tales are told non-chronologically and from different characters’ perspectives, which is both an unnerving method to measure out the story and a powerful means of misdirection. Indeed, while it doesn’t ever lie, the film deliberately misleads for effect: clearly we’re meant to infer that the middle-aged couple on the way to the school are Kat’s parents, late because of Joan and the storm; Joan bears a distinct passing resemblance to Kat, so when the father says that Joan reminds him of his daughter, it’s obvious what we’re supposed to think. Then the truth comes out in small leaks: the daughter died eight years ago; the daughter is not Kat, but rather Rose. I can see why some people might find that cheap, but I thought it was an effective way to keep viewers off-balance.
To call this atmospheric horror is perhaps a misnomer, because there’s nothing to breathe. Between a muted color palette, the isolation of the school setting and the weather, the sparseness of the dialogue and the pace of its delivery, and a haunting score that disquiets in the best possible way, The Blackcoat’s Daughter contrives a vacuum so perfect even nature kinda digs it a little. More impatient viewers may well give up on a film that sometimes feels like a tone poem meditation on an empty bowl, but when any little thing disturbs the surface tension—say, frenetic shots of Kat repeatedly prostrating herself by the orange light of the boiler, or convulsing and twisting herself into unnatural positions in bed—the effect is seismic. You’ve floated in space long enough to have forgotten which way is up.
To be honest, I found it really hard to write about this movie. If you strip away the beheadings, the distorted satanic voices, and the possession-contortions, at its core The Blackcoat’s Daughter is a film about being so lonely you’d beg the devil not to abandon you. If I’d seen this before March it wouldn’t have hit me quite so hard. Seeing it in September was like getting hit by a truck being swung by another larger, angrier truck. If slow burns, abandonment issues, and demonic possession are your bag, this is the movie for you; it was certainly the movie for me. Be prepared to watch it twice.
Not all that long before I started this ridiculous blog, I happened to catch the Netflix original The Babysitter during a late-night treadmill run and I fell in love with its odd mix of humor, splatter horror, and genuine heart. While rehydrating and reading more about this little gem of a film that I’d somehow missed for a couple of years, I discovered to my delight that a sequel was already in post-production! Ah, the occasional joys of being perennially late to the party. Fast-forward to today: The Babysitter: Killer Queen dropped this very morning, and I wasn’t going to wait around for long before checking it out. Would it succumb to the all-too-common yet dreaded sequelitis, and be a pale and unnecessary shadow of the original? Or would it join the rarefied ranks among the very few sequels that surpass their forebears?
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