The New Black

As I mentioned, Halloween season is already starting. Ms. B requested The Blackcoat's Daughter (2015), based on a recommendation from her usual crew of horror writers. I've had it on my radar since Rod Heath's review, so we gave it a try.

It is set in a conservative Catholic girl's school. It's the last day before winter break, and Keirnan Shipka has a dream that her parent's have died in a car crash. In waking life, as all the parents come and go, she is left behind, along with Lucy Boynton, who claims that she told her parent's to come get her the next day by mistake. Shipka is an odd detached girl, who wants the priest who runs the school to come to her recital that day. But he has to go away for a convention, and he reminds her that, ha ha, she "can't live here."

So the two girls will be left in the school overnight with two old nuns.

Meanwhile, Boynton sneaks out of the school to go driving with a boy. When they get back, it seems that she is breaking up with him because she is pregnant. She is clearly a wild child, not like the shy, proper and weird Shipka. Who, by the way, still hasn't heard from her parents. But she does hear strange noises and maybe voices. 

These stories are intertwined with a third girl, Emma Roberts. She is shivering in a cold bus stop out, and James Remar and his wife stop to pick her up. She resembles Shipka enough so I thought she might be the same character, maybe running away from the school. But she seems to be getting closer. Remar does everything he can to avoid looking creepy, and still looks creepy. It turns out that his daughter was killed near the school, and so he wants to help other young women. His wife doesn't want anything to do with this.

Most of this movie is slow and elliptical. There are enough time slips and cutting between characters to keep you off balance a lot of the time. We liked this atmospheric part pretty well. However, in the last act (SPOILER), it becomes a demonic possession slasher. There is even a scene with the killer standing with a dripping knife. 

The movie was written and directed by Osgood Perkins, Tony Perkins' son. He's obviously got a good background in horror. But nobody dies in a shower.

In conclusion, who, exactly, was the blackcoat?