Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.5
Overall		3.5

The Blackcoat's Daughter Blu-ray Movie Review

Is there a boarding school on Mulholland Drive?

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman May 29, 2017

Note: It’s virtually impossible to discuss The Blackcoat’s Daughter without at least hinting at plot points that the more perspicacious reader may be able to glean “spoiler” material from, so anyone wanting to come to this film “cold” (no pun intended, given its original title, February), is encouraged to skip down to the technical portions of the review, below. (The fact that I also potentially spoil both Psycho and The Sixth Sense, with at least a chance at spoiling Mulholland Dr., may also be relevant to whether proceeding with the main body of the review is advisable, and, yes, this is said with tongue planted firmly in cheek.)

Anthony Perkins will probably forever be best remembered as a certain (shall we say) confused character (or characters, as the case may be) in Alfred Hitchcock’s immortal Psycho, wielding a bloody knife in one of the most memorable and shocking murder scenes ever caught on celluloid. Anthony’s son Oz is on hand as the writer and director of The Blackcoat’s Daughter, another film that offers a blurred line between various characters, not to mention a copious amount of knife wielding and blood letting. In doing some background research in preparation for the writing of this review, I was actually downright surprised to read that The Blackcoat’s Daughter had evidently engendered all sorts of head scratching as to what exactly was going on in its (to me, anyway) pretty straightforward (if twisty) narrative, a surprise that was only furthered by the fact that I personally feel this film’s poster suggests way too much in terms of what actually turns out to be the main plot conceit. As I’ve detailed in various other reviews, I do tend to be a “twist guesser”, and as such I had a hunch that the three characters focused on in this film were perhaps more intrinsically linked than might seem to be the case on the surface (I’m struggling not to posit any out and out spoiler material, but, again, forewarned is forearmed), and as confusing as some viewers evidently found The Blackcoat’s Daughter to be, inveterate thriller fans who have relished one actor playing multiple parts (as with Anthony Perkins in Psycho) or even more than one performer (at least arguably) playing the same part (as in David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr., a film whose setup may have provided at least some of the inspiration for Perkins’ screenplay), will probably have a leg up at overcoming both the late stage “reveal” in this film as well as in understanding an ending that is memorable if opaque.

Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) is a freshman at a tony Catholic boarding institution of learning in upstate New York called The Bramford School. She has a disturbing dream where her father arrives to pick her up for break, only to reveal that the car he was driving in has been involved in a horrific accident. The fate of Kat’s mother is undisclosed, though it’s hinted that the dream is prophetic and that neither parent is among the living. In a frankly bizarre segue, Kat is called into the offices of Father Brien, where the two engage in a patently odd conversation about Kat’s upcoming piano recital, which the Father is going to have to miss. There is tons of subtext in this brief scene, to the point that I personally started wondering if there were a sexual relationship between the two. This short and ultimately kind of tangential section of The Blackcoat’s Daughter frankly confused me much more than any of the later developments which evidently caused so much consternation on the part of other viewers.

Meanwhile an older girl at the school named Rose (Lucy Boynton) is dealing with a pregnancy scare. When neither Kat’s nor Rose’s parents show up to pick them up for break (it’s hinted that Rose lied about the pickup date in order to buy a little time to deal with her “issue”), the girls are left in the care of two elderly women nurses who are staying at the facility. Rose is ostensibly a “babysitter” for Kat, though she’s too concerned with her potential parenthood to do much but warn Kat to stay out of her (Rose’s) room. Rose does take time to let Kat know the school scuttlebutt is that the two elderly nurses are Satan worshippers, and so it’s probably best to stay away from them, as well.

So far, so good, and in fact some “twist guessers” may (like I initially did) think that there’s a psychological tether between Kat and Rose. That basic concept may be cogent, but it relates to another character who is introduced about as disjunctively as the sudden appearance of Diane Selwyn in Lynch’s hallucinatory masterpiece. That character is Joan (Emma Roberts), who is initially shown to be ripping what looks like a hospital identification band off of her wrist, and whose flashbacks at least suggest she may have been a recent resident in a mental institution. (If “twist guessers” aren’t already experiencing the little hairs rising on the back of their necks, you might not be adequately prepared for what it means when Haley Joel Osment looks at Bruce Willis and says he sees dead people in The Sixth Sense.) Joan meets a middle aged couple named Bill (James Remar) and Linda (Lauren Holly) who offer to give her a ride, which not so coincidentally is toward The Bramford School.

When Bill reveals to Joan that she reminds him of his daughter, the puzzle pieces start falling into place, and the rest of The Blackcoat’s Daughter attempts to stitch together these seemingly disparate narratives into a coherent whole. The film is undeniably strong on mood, with a palpable sense of the frigid environment (emotionally and physically) at the boarding school, but the screenplay’s logic leaves a bit to be desired. (One salient case in point, and the closest I’ll come to an out and out spoiler in this review: if your child had been brutally murdered by a known assailant, wouldn’t you know what that assailant looked like?) Performances are generally very good, if perhaps intentionally dissociative. Perkins plays with framings and even techniques like slow motion to invest a lot of The Blackcoat’s Daughter with a dreamlike ambience, but like a lot of dreams, you may not be totally sure everything made sense once it ends.

The Blackcoat's Daughter Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Blackcoat's Daughter is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.84:1. Shot digitally with the Red Epic (according to the IMDb), the film boasts a generally well detailed image when lighting regimens allow. As can clearly be seen in many of the screenshots accompanying this review, Perkins and cinematographer Julie Kirkwood favor rather dark environments quite a bit of the time, something that of course ups the anxiety level but which understandably tends to work against fine detail levels. Some grading has been employed, to rather interesting effect at times, with a largely desaturated frame having one or two elements that still retain a bit of vivid hue. Perkins and Kirkwood also offer some at least somewhat unusual framings at time, with the supposed focal element drifting off the perimeter of the frame (see screenshot 6 for one example). Without much in the way of supplementary material and without an extended running time, The Blackcoat's Daughter resides quite comforably on a BD-25 without any noticeable compression anomalies.

The Blackcoat's Daughter Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

While The Blackcoat's Daughter's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track provides some nice immersion courtesy of nicely directional ambient environmental effects, it (commendably to my ears) doesn't really exploit startle effects, something that may make it less sonically showy than tends to be the case with many horror outings. Another son of Anthony Perkins, Oz's little brother Elvis, contributes the fairly astringent score, one which also provides consistent surround activity. Dialogue and effects are both rendered clearly on this problem free track.

The Blackcoat's Daughter Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Audio Commentary with Writer/Director Osgood Perkins


• The Dead of Winter: Making The Blackcoat's Daughter (1080p; 6:56) is a brief EPK that contains some minor spoilers.

The Blackcoat's Daughter Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I frankly don't think I'm that good of a "twist guesser" (though I had the "secret" of The Sixth Sense worked out within about a nanosecond of the setup), but The Blackcoat's Daughter just struck me as overly obvious, something that was evidently not shared by a number of people who saw the film theatrically and were apparently quite confused by it. Even if you do guess the ostensible "twist", the mood of this film is eerily effective and establishes the clear fact that Osgood Perkins has a perhaps genetic eye for horror. Technical merits are very good, and with caveats noted, The Blackcoat's Daughter comes Recommended.