The Blackcoat's Daughter: When a young person is abandoned and isolated, what sort of hole does it leave in them? And what sort of ideas, or things, can find their way in to fill it?
Those are the questions that spur writer/director Oz Perkins in The Blackcoat's Daughter, but he's less interested in interrogating them through character or theme than using it as a springboard for a film that devotes itself almost entirely to its chilly and deeply unsettling mood.
The story takes place along two seemingly unrelated plot threads, one about two girls left behind at their religious school during break, and the other about a young woman who hitches a ride with a married couple. The plot threads don't seem to make a whole lot of sense at first, and Perkins drags out any answers for as long as possible, seemingly content in letting them become gradually more sinister as they progress. The threads do eventually connect, and in a fairly surprising way, but Perkins seems more invested in the cleverness of his narrative structure than in any inherent value to the characters within.
Taken at face value as a horror film, The Blackcoat's Daughter certainly does the trick (boiler rooms were already scary, but...jesus). This is a deeply unsettling movie, progressing from odd noises and looks that feel slightly off, to truly ugly and unhinged acts of graphic violence, clinically portrayed through the sparse framing of the camera, and punctuated by well timed cuts to spare your eyes of the most graphic details, but not your imagination.
But, as creepy as it is, it makes me wonder how much more effective the film would be if all the characters weren't held just out of arms reach the whole way through. What Perkins gains in his creepy, and mysterious tone by making everyone exist in an uncanny limbo between a kind of sympathetic pity, and an unknowing sinister potential, where any glance could mean something evil, he loses out on the ability for his audience to really connect with the anyone and the story as a whole, and thus render all its terror to something tangible and lasting.
Thankfully, the ending to the film is its most effective moment, as all the cards are on the table, and Perkins at last ties in the most horrifying elements and anchors them to expand on a character and the questions that kicked off the film in the first place. This allows him to end the film on a note that chills far deeper than the vague unease or unflinching violence that preceded it, forcing you to reflect on the horror long past that final cut to black.
acspits out of 5. I feel like I'm being hyperbolic here but this don't deserve a less inflammatory response. stay away from it. 
