The film's opening immediately sets the tone for what's to come as a young girl named Kat, in a dream-like state, imagines her parents picking her up from her all-girls prep school a day early. As she snaps back to reality, we learn that her parents have not arrived to pick her up for winter break, and she, along with another girl named Rose, are the only two girls left at this prep school as everyone else has left. While we have no idea where Kat's parents are, we quickly learn that Rose is purposefully delaying the arrival of her parents over fears that she may be pregnant. Rose, the older of the two girls, is left to take care of Kat until someone arrives to pick one of them up. While you might have an idea of where this is going, especially when you see how dark and cold and creepy this school is, what actually ends up happening is...well, I'll just say unsettling for right now.
There is, however, a subplot involving a young meandering woman named Joan, who gets off a bus in an unknown Upstate New York town where she meets an older couple and tries to hitch a ride with them to a town called Port Smith, which happens to be the town where Kat and Rose go to school. And I'll just leave it right there so I can keep this a spoiler-free review, because, very much like the documentary Nuts!, which I also saw at the Chicago Critics Film Festival, this is a film you want to know as little about going in as possible.
If you google Oz Perkins, one of the first things you'll find out is that he lost his father (Anthony Perkins, aka the original Norman Bates) to AIDS and his mother to 9/11 within almost exactly nine years of each other, so this man is clearly no stranger to despair and it shows in both the directing and storytelling of this film. The way in which Perkins structures this abstract cinematic dream with a haunting sense of dread hooked me immediately and increasingly got under my skin as the film went along. But one of the things he also manages to do is pay some beautiful tributes to the films of Alfred Hitchcock, not the least of which being the one his father starred in, Psycho (there's a couple of tribute shots that literally almost made me applaud). The cinematography by Julie Kirkwood (who's quickly solidifying her presence on the indie scene with films such as Hello, I Must Be Going) perfectly captures the cold emptiness of Upstate New York and of the prep school that constantly haunts the characters, whether they're in it or not.
But perhaps the element of this film that most solidified its presence in my mind long after I saw it was the brilliant performances. Lucy Boynton, who I hadn't even heard of until I developed a crush on her in Sing Street (which I will be reviewing on this blog next week, in preparation for its release on video), brings such a sense of groundedness and normalcy to her role in this film that I never once viewed her as an object like so many horror film actresses are. The scene after she comes back from a night at her boyfriend's and discovers something in the room made me legitimately fear for her, as opposed to rooting for her death like you might in a lesser horror film. Emma Roberts also brings ground to her work as Joan, even though you can tell she has had more experience with these kind of roles (heck, she's even on a TV show called Scream Queens); nonetheless, she has a perfectly keen sense of the world of this story and dials her acting down accordingly. But the real surprise to me came from Kiernan Shipka, who I hadn't seen in anything before this film (yes, I'm the only person on the planet who hasn't watched Mad Men); she legitimately scared the crap out of me with her performance. Either Perkins just got a damn good performance out of her or she just has a knack for playing creepy roles, but there are some scenes toward the end of this movie with her that actually haunted me. And never once did it feel overplayed or trying-too-hard or even remotely bad. Kiernan Shipka, much like Ruby Barnhill in The BFG (a film that deserved much better than it got), is someone I very much look forward to seeing in more roles in the future.
The Blackcoat's Daughter is a horror film that, in many ways, reminded me of the early works of M. Night Shyamalan; a film that relies on atmosphere and ideas and suspence to elicit chills. And while there is blood and gore in this film, what makes it actually effective is that there's only a few occurances of it. It's not just a slasher movie where there's eyeballs and intestines splattering the screen for ninety minutes; the kills are spaced out enough and late enough that they're legitimately shocking when they happen. But either way, this is not a movie about that; rather, it's a film about having to face your past and having to face reality even if it's dreadful and scary to do. And with some great work by terrific young actresses and an incredibly promising debut from Oz Perkins, this is a horror film with a brilliant sense of dread and beautiful, poignant underlying subtext that is absolutely worth seeking out.
