The Blackcoat's Daughter

The Blackcoat's Daughter (2015) aka February, starring Emma Roberts, Kiernan Shipka, Lucy Boynton, James Remar, and Lauren Holly. Directed by Oz Perkins.

The directorial debut of the son of the original Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), this slow-burner tale of demonic possession at a remote girl's boarding school is one of those films that critics loved but audiences didn't embrace all that enthusiastically. It currently has a Metacritics score of 68 at IMBd, while the audience score is just 5.8 out of 10.

Two things can be true at the same time:

1. The Blackcoat's Daughter is a much better film than many audiences give it credit for, and

2. Much of the audience haterade is justified.

First off, if this film were a Jeopardy category, it would be called "Things That People Hate About Indie Films." There isn't a lot of dialog, and what there is of it is generally spoken in a flat, barely audible monotone. In addition, much of the dialog is punctuated by. Very. Long. Pauses.

There are glacially paced scenes of characters doing mundane things like using the toilet, taking a shower, sitting for a photograph, or setting the table, all set to a droning, nerve-wracking score.

There's also a non-linear plot full of confusing flashbacks and split/second images. The cinematography is unrelentingly dull, flat-toned, and dark.

That's the bad news. If you manage to sit through these often-tedious features, the pay-off is pretty good: This film gets under your skin and makes you think long after the ending, which is what a good horror movie should do.

The opening sequence starts off with an eerie little ditty, sung by Elvis Perkins, the director's brother, over the credits. It goes like this:

Deedle, deedle, the Blackcoat's Daughter/What was in the holy water?/Went to bed with an unclean head/The angels, they forgot her

(I'll give my explanation of what I think the lyrics mean later on in this article.)

One of the first things that occurred to me about this opening is the similarity to the openings of two famous horror films from the 60s: Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961), starring Deborah Kerr, and Robert Aldrich's Hush. . .Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), staring Bette Davis. Significantly, both films open with creepy, sung ditties and both are about mentally fragile women living in foreboding, isolated buildings in the countryside. I don't know if Perkins meant to make an homage to the two earlier films, but it wouldn't surprise me if he knew of them, considering his family background.

The Blackcoat's Daughter takes place at an old, isolated Catholic boarding school for high school girls, set somewhere in the rural, snowy Northeast (upstate New York?). The school is dark and grim, and most of the students and staff are eager to go home for winter break in mid-February. Two, however, are left behind: a naive freshman girl named Kat (Kiernan Shipka from the Mad Men series) and a beautiful, "mean girl"-type older girl named Rose (Lucy Boynton).

Kat's parents never show up, and she comes to believe that they are dead in a car crash. Rose has told her parents to come later than the assigned pick-up date, for personal reasons of her own. Kat, Rose, and a skeleton staff of two nuns stay at the unnervingly empty school as snow piles up outside, creating a bleak and sterile-looking landscape, that contrasts with the moldy, musty old interiors of the school.

While Rose frets about her personal problem, Kat begins behaving in increasingly odd ways, which includes worshipping something in the basement near the old-fashioned boiler, and talking on the hall pay phone to a mysterious, demonic-sounding voice.

Meanwhile, in the countryside outside the school, we meet another girl, a hitchhiker named Joan (Emma Roberts), who, it's revealed, is connected to the school somehow, although it is not spelled out exactly how until much later. Joan bums a ride with a middle-aged couple (James Remar and Lauren Holly), who are driving in the direction of the school. She's a dangerous passenger who, in a flashback, appears to be an escaped hospital patient who's strangled a woman to death and assumed her identity.

The eventual intersection of Kat, Rose, Joan, the middle-aged couple, and the two nuns is gruesome and brutal, but not much is shown explicitly; the bloody stuff is either kept off-camera or partially obscured by the dark and smudgy camera work. Suffice to say, this is a film that features five decapitations, but hardly any gore. There are also some blink-and-you-miss-it homages to other movies, such as The Exorcist (1973), and the famous "Spiderwalk" footage that was cut from the original release of that legendary film. (You can see the Spiderwalk footage on YouTube.) The non-linear plot is tied up with a bleak, nasty, and melancholy ending. I recommend watching it at least twice to really appreciate what's going on.

As for the opening ditty, which is repeated in a more upbeat tone over the ending credits, here's my take: The Blackcoat's Daughter is clearly the increasingly deranged Kat--at the beginning of the film, she has a dream where a mysterious figure in a shiny black coat shows her a car accident that has killed her parents. She then she wakes up and sees the same figure hovering over her bed, and she asks him if he's her father.

"What was in the holy water?" There's a suggestion at one point that the school has been the locus for demonic activity for quite some time. The lyrics are the usual reference of "something in the water" to explain crazy or violent human behavior. "Went to bed on an unclean head" Kat had evil thoughts about the beautiful Rose, whom she clearly envied, and that opened the door of her mind to a demonic presence. "The angels they forgot her" Angels are supposed to look out for their human charges in Catholic belief; the angels assigned to Kat weren't paying attention, and a huge tragedy ensued.

6.5/10, currently streaming on Amazon.