Movie Review : The Blackcoat's Daughter (2015)
When I was a kid, I was afraid of closed doors at night. A closed door meant something had already made its decision. It was in the house, hiding. It didn’t care if I knew it was there, it cared that my parents didn’t. That made me the sole line of defense, a eight-year-old sentinel keeping watch over a two-bedroom bungalow like I was guarding Helm’s Deep. I didn’t know what the threat was supposed to be. I just knew it was wrong. Wrong to be there, wrong to hide and wrong that the grown-ups didn’t see it.
I’ve always been scared of things showing up where they don’t belong. That’s probably why The Blackcoat’s Daughter hit me like a repressed memory. It’s not a movie about evil things jumping out at you. It’s about evil slipping quietly into your reality. Both a metaphor and spiritual boogeyman.
The Blackcoat’s Daughter feels like driving a lonely highway at night: miss a turn, and you’ll find yourself somewhere you didn’t expect and you won't find your way back. It follows Kat (Jena Malone's long-lost sibling Kiernan Shipka), a withdrawn teen left behind at a remote Catholic boarding school over winter break. Her parents are unreachable, and Rose (Lucy Boynton), a senior reluctantly tasked with watching over her, soon realizes they’re not alone in the empty halls.
In a parallel thread, Joan (Emma Roberts), a fragile, mysterious young woman, is picked up by an eerie yet seemingly gentle elderly couple on a lonely road, headed toward the same cold, isolated New England private school.
Satan (And The Fucked Up Thing About Puberty)
At its core, this is a movie about schoolgirls trapped in an empty Catholic school with a boiler room demon. But you never actually see the demon, and there’s almost no traditional supernatural horror. What Osgood Perkins provides instead is possessed teenagers, institutional trauma and traditionally feminine signifiers (vulnerability, demureness, obedience) being twisted into instruments of murder and entropy, delivering in minimalist gothic settings that would’ve made daddy Lovecraft proud.
There’s a literal monster in the closet, but the real nightmare is how it quietly turns into a metaphor when you’re not looking. Kat heads down into the boiler room and comes back with something riding shotgun in her body. Not a demon exactly, more like puberty wearing a Satan costume. And honestly, it’s kind of perfect. What scared you as a kid doesn’t disappear when you grow up. It just gets tenure. It becomes part of your personality.
You used to fear the dark because it was unknown. Then one day, you realize the dark is you and somehow, that’s both horrifying and kind of empowering. You thought there were choices. Turns out, there was only ever one path: straight into the furnace, baby.
The Blackcoat’s Daughter never spells it out for you like, let's The Conjuring, which basically prints out a PowerPoint on demonology halfway through the movie. Minimalism is the operating idea here. The big turning point isn’t a crucifix melting or a blood-soaked dream sequence, it’s Rose, annoyed and dismissive, telling Kat she’s not doing anything nice for a freshman. Kat quietly answers, "You’ve had your chance." It’s not loud. It’s not flashy. But it lands like a curse whispered through a keyhole.
Perkins never puts the Devil on screen, but he’s there. Lurking. Calling on the phone. Whispering from the boiler room like a bad friend trying to get you to skip school and do something irreversible. You never see him, but you absolutely feel him. And while Satan might be the one nudging things along, the horror, the violence, the emptiness, the cold precision of it all comes straight from the people he’s already gotten to.
Joan's Not Feeling Well
And then there’s poor Joan, found half-dead at a bus stop by a Good Samaritan named Bill (played by Dexter's dad James Remar, which already feels like a red flag). She looks like the perfect victim: thin, pale, fragile and hee looks like the kind of guy who’s read one too many articles about being a "protector". * He offers her a ride, but the car’s parked just far enough down a dark New England road to feel like a setup. It's the kind of moment that shouldn’t feel ominous, but totally does.
The devil, as they say, is in the details. And that’s the twist: Bill never lies. He’s kind. He’s honest. Everything he says checks out. But he still radiates danger. Not because he is dangerous, but because it's a classically dangerous setup for young women and nothing is more dangerous than a man who's oblivious to his own weakness.
Joan’s storyline is a quiet inversion of every woman-in-jeopardy trope you’ve ever been spoon-fed by Hollywood. She looks vulnerable. She trusts a stranger. She’s just trying to get back to school. But she’s not prey. Not exactly. She’s also not a full-blown cold-blooded killer in the Strange Darling mold either. Joan isn’t in control, but she’s not helpless. She’s being carried by something bigger than her, something dark and cosmic and completely indifferent to morality. Which makes the usual dangers-of-the-world, creepy men, snowy highways and misplaced trust feel almost quaint.
And the real trick is that Perkins never lets you settle. He keeps peeling back the layers of Joan’s story like an evil burlesque act: slow, deliberate, and just revealing enough to make you uncomfortable. You don’t know what’s underneath, but you know it isn’t lingerie.
*
Osgood Perkins is becoming one of my favorite horror storytellers. His movies crawl under your skin and hang out there, quietly unsettling you for weeks. The more you think about them, the more their fucked-up little nuances start to bloom. I gave Longlegs a decent review last year, but honestly, it gets better every time I watch it and I hate this rating now.
The Blackcoat’s Daughter is a slow-burn modern gothic that plays like a true crime YouTube video you stumble across at 1 a.m after a night out. The kind about some horrific murder you’ve never heard of, but that will keep you awake for the foreseeable future.
* I fucking hate that word
7.9/10
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