Now Streaming on Netflix: The Blackcoat's Daughter

Photo from IMDB. 

The Blackcoat’s Daughter is a 2015 horror film from director Oz Perkins (I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House) that turned heads at the Toronto International Film Festival where it premiered as February. Perkins’ horror debut tiptoed into some theatres afterward, but mostly the indie film stayed in the shadows, crowded out by louder franchise horror films. Recently added to Netflix and renamed, The Blackcoat’s Daughter is finally getting its moment to be seen. But, is it worth the watch?

Movie Review: The Blackcoat's Daughter 

When Branford Academy’s annual February break rolls around, two of the schoolgirls are left behind in the shuffle. Popular senior Rose (Lucy Boynton, Murder on the Orient Express), who purposefully told her parents the wrong date so she has more time to deal with a big little problem she has, and quiet Freshman Kat (Kiernan Shipka, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) who is convinced that the reason her parents didn’t show up is because they’re dead. 

“Holy extra dot com, Batman!” and welcome to The Blackcoat’s Daughter.

Tasked with keeping an eye on the painfully quiet and vaguely creepy Kat while the headmaster is away, Rose taunts Kat with rumors that the nuns are devil worshippers. Because, Catholic school. And Rose is eager to get Kat of her case, and what better way to do so than spewing out the threat of Satanic goings-on? Soon, as if brought to life by Rose’s words alone, a faceless dark force begins stalking the girls. 

Gif from GIPHY

With sneaky hints of possession and a ghastly apparition or two creeping around the school, The Blackcoat’s Daughter takes a slow-burn approach to its horror setting the scene in the antiquated and disquietingly empty boarding school during the dead of winter. With both protagonists stranded in remote upstate New York and confined to really just one location the skeletal plot is given a little more “meat” with the attempts at building up an atmospheric setting-- think, shadowy hallways, flickering lights, and eerie noises. But, it’s nothing novel. 

The Blackcoat’s Daughter’s characters are three of the least developed and least compelling characters to ever hit the screen. With its character-centric storyline and the entire plot hingeing on their performances and importance, The Blackcoat’s Daughter is a tremendous letdown. Kiernan Shipka isn’t given much to do but shuffle around aimlessly and gloomy. Rose is just as spiritless with a dilemma that has perhaps the least amount of drama and tension ever. Even Scream Queen and horror darling Emma Roberts (American Horror Story, Scream 4) is underappreciated and given almost less to do than Shipka. This is a real shame because Roberts has more than proved her formidable horror acting chops in Ryan Murphy’s aforementioned AHS anthology. Roberts’s character Joan, a hitchhiking young twenty-something,  is given a flimsy backstory, a bland narrative, and to be frank, an ending that makes no sense whatsoever other than to elicit dramatic gasps. 

Photo from IMDB.

The Blackcoat’s Daughter overly simplistic plot and one-dimensional characters might’ve been more forgivable if it hadn’t been so lethargically slow. Uninterrupted shots of vacant hallways and Kat speechlessly roaming around the school aren’t unsettling for the audience, they’re uninteresting. So much time is spent waiting around for the action to happen, like repeatedly watching Kat and Rose waking up and falling asleep in their bed that by the time the final act rolls around in all its frenzied hacking, slashing and blood splattering glory it’s too late. 

The Blackcoat’s Daughter could have been so much more. With its boiler room demon worshipping session, human sacrifices, and cold-blooded killer who fancies decapitating victims, The Blackcoat’s Daughter checks off nearly all of the boxes of the most basic of horror movie tropes and has a solid jumping off point. 

But it’s a glaringly hollow and fruitless lesson in patience. It’s so quiet, restrained and understated that it barely resembles any flavor of horror. It settles more into the drama genre and wants to be profoundly psychological but with its weak atmosphere and passable cinematography it never quite reaches that point. 

While at the very least The Blackcoat’s Daughter isn’t entirely derivative and it’s not gimmicky it also isn’t entertaining. Rigidly built with extended pauses, irritatingly selectively mute characters, and a geriatric plot pacing, The Blackcoat’s Daughter is glaringly devoid of any tension and genuine thrills. It’s contemplative, but that’s literally all it is. As vacant as the nearly catatonic protagonist, Kat, it takes the classic horror tropes --dark Catholic boarding school, Satanic nuns and school girl possessions-- and is disappointingly passive with them. 

The Blackcoat’s Daughter is ultimately a soulless, empty and forgettable film, one hardly worth adding to any “to-watch” queue. 

Photo from IMDB.