Why I Love… #169: The Blackcoat’s Daughter

Year:  2015

Director:  Osgood Perkins

Stars:  Emma Roberts, Lucy Boynton, Kiernan Shipka

Osgood ‘Oz’ Perkins is cooking up a storm right now with his Satanic serial killer horror Longlegs, so much so that it seemed more than appropriate to petition those newly invested in his work to cast an eye back to his 2015 feature debut, another brooding chiller that eschews much of the expected horror playbook in favour of a more elliptical enquiry into demonic acts.

Chiller is a fine descriptor for The Blackcoat’s Daughter – also known as February in some territories – set in the late days of its sometime-titular month. We’re in and around the grounds of snowy preparatory girls’ school Branford in upstate New York as it empties out at the end of the semester. The mood is wintry and desolate. The Blackcoat’s Daughter effectively plays out as a loose-limbed anthology of a kind, telling the interconnect stories of three willowy young women left to their own devices for various reasons when everyone else has gone home for the holidays. Alexander Payne’s recent hit The Holdovers may spring to mind, but this is a far more insidious affair, such is the sense of poise and mood one quickly comes to associate with the work of Perkins.

Brittle and barren (there’s score here but of a grainy, droning bent, so ambient sounds come and go creating their own amorphous flex and significance), the mood is perhaps comparable to the sense of sadness evoked by Ti West at the beginning of his career high, The House of the Devil. That’s more than a little ironic considering Perkins’ recent dispersions of West’s output, but it’s also more or less where the similarities end. Perkins’ certain young women all adhere to a ‘type’; pale, waifish, deer-eyed. Vulnerable but also independent, introverted and brave. Beautiful but in various ways unknowable and inscrutable.

First up is Rose (Lucy Boynton), the titular daughter of a preacher man. Feigning sickness, she shrugs off the responsibility of looking after younger holdover Kat (Kiernan Shipka) while she waits the two days for her parents to arrive (supposedly she told them the wrong date). Wandering campus, she is drawn to the particularly ominous basement where she witnesses a mysterious figure in sinister prayer.

Next up is the story’s relative outlier, Joan (Emma Roberts), glimpsed briefly in the first act at a bus station, seemingly in need of some assistance. We meet her flighty in a motel room, seemingly suffering from flashbacks to a similarly dark figure. It transpires she’s taken some aid from concerned priest Bill (James Remar). Her destination appears to be the same preparatory school where Rose and Kat are – or, as it turns out, were – holed up. We’re nine years later. We’re inclined to view Bill’s altruism through a veil of cynicism. That he might be preying upon Joan. The mismatched pair size one another up on the road as Perkins plays a stealthy game of suspense through the cadences and inflections of speech, parcelling out information about Bill’s connection to Rose.

The third act is labelled Kat’s, and it does return her to the film’s focus, but it also weaves the timelines back together for all, revealing a sinister if deceptively simple story. A mystery only thanks to Perkins’ deliberate narrative schisms. The edits of a storyteller.

Kat’s inability to say grace, coupled with other deep-set suggestions of possession have Rose on high alert. What’s more, a horned presence – not dissimilar to one found in the shadows of Longlegs – seems to be reaching out to the girl. Those isolated days of waiting are revealed as the violent epicentre of Perkins’ puzzle. A time of either opportunity or vulnerability in which a Satanic presence holds sway over Kat.

Perkins uses his delicate, patient pacing against us here, pivoting to a rapid onslaught that we’re not entirely prepared for. Chiaroscuro is utilised to obliterate Kat’s visage, furthering the feeling that she’s been consumed by a darkness. She often feels like a negative space in the frame. A void.

Kat’s story culminates in the school basement in a sequence of sinister sonic discord. The industrial furnace conjures a sense of man-made horror. Rust and fire. A different kind of Satanic linkage. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure came up in several readings of Longlegs (though the Japanese auteur’s later thriller Creepy is more apt in that case). Here, The Blackcoat’s Daughter feels spiritually connected to his millennial nightmare Pulse. The connection is there not just in the dour palette and hopeless mood throughout, but the sense that an outside force has overridden character identity. That a tangible evil might make us mindless ciphers. Not so much possession but elimination of character.

That leaves us with the importance of Joan. Foreshadowed by one of those eerily ominous driving shots that Perkins is so uncannily adept at capturing, Joan – a physical echo of both Kat and Rose – completes a pattern of violence that leads right back to Branford. If the prior sections of The Blackcoat’s Daughter were successfully moody, it’s late chapter prefigures the sense of coalescing evil that haunts all of Longlegs, showing that Perkins had the juice from the get-go.

At the culmination of a refreshingly underplayed exorcism scene, Kat and her ‘demon’ are separated and Perkins plays a small masterstroke, depicting Kat as mournful of the loss. “Don’t go” she pleads to the horned shadow as it turns from her side. In this moment the film captures something of the dark unity of an abusing or abusive presence somewhere in the vicinity of Stockholm Syndrome. The id’s desire for love so strong that even the most vile facsimile could be wanted, needed. There’s an argument to be made that this story has only victims.

Longlegs may show an enhanced finesse from Perkins – as it should, being a fourth feature – but The Blackcoat’s Daughter retains a special place for me as much of the unease is born between the atonal soundscapes, the judicious rhythms of cutting and the minutiae in the performances of the three leads. Roberts, who can play brash and comic with gusto, is small and contained here. Shipka – fresh from eight years of acting class on Mad Men – coolly unreadable. Boynton, meanwhile, has the aura of a classic Hollywood beauty faking smiles for the camera (literally the point of one scene that seems designed as a red herring). All three work small wonders considering the minimalism of the register asked of them.

Perkins has his evident fascinations that have played out across all four of his films. There’s a sense of the obsessive compulsive about his attempts to approach one subject from multiple angles, like a painter trying to capture one object again and again from different vantage points, looking for some kind of truth in different light sources. Adept at a certain mood that makes fantasies of the dark supernatural feel not only real but present, he now, at last, seems to have an audience primed to be taken on such journeys. If Longlegs made you an obsessive, The Blackcoat’s Daughter is your next obvious port of call.