Directed and written by Oz Perkins, son of actor Anthony Perkins who is best known today for the role of Norman Bates in the Alfred Hitchcock directed Psycho, The Blackcoat’s Daughter sure does play out like a Hitchcockian horror film.

Here’s its trailer:

I found it humorous to see, after the fact, a couple of videos also on YouTube “explaining” the film and, in my opinion, the explanations are sometimes quite off.

Which leads us to The Blackcoat’s Daughter’s (BD from here on) biggest problem: It presents a story in a very non-linear manner (nothing wrong about that) but fails to be clear enough about what we’re seeing and, worse, getting us to care enough about it.

Which is not to say BD is a total bust.

Mr. Perkins has clearly sucked in Alfred Hitchcock’s oeuvre and if nothing else this film reflects his love for that thrill master’s work.  BD is elegant, measured, and when it gets bloody it certainly reminded me of the film Psycho.

However, the story presented simply doesn’t take you in as it should and while the final reveal (another Psycho inspired element?) is made, you must have seen it coming from a long way away.

In a nutshell, BD goes like this:

At an upscale Catholic boarding school Freshman Kat (Kiernan Shipka) awaken from a nightmare where she walks through a snowy parking lot and sees a crashed vehicle which clearly has some victims within it.  That day in late February (which, by the way, was the original name of the film), the school goes on break and parents are supposed to pick up all the kids for a week off.

Kat is clearly disturbed by this vision and somehow appears to know that her parents will not come to pick her up.  Even more eerily, she has a strange attachment to the school’s headmaster and is bothered that he won’t be around for her piano recital given on the date of the parental pickups.

Meanwhile, fellow, but older, student Rose (Lucy Boynton) is a more rebellious student who fears she is pregnant.

When the parents show up to pick up the kids in the boarding school, neither Kat nor Rose’s parents show up.  Kat, who had the premonition of his parent’s death, is very disturbed they haven’t shown up.  Rose, on the other hand, played her parents and told them the pickup date was later that week.  This was done so she could talk with her boyfriend and tell him of her possible pregnancy.

Meanwhile (part deux), a mysterious young woman named Joan (Emma Roberts) is taking a bus to a mysterious destination.  After arriving at her destination, she sits on a bench in the winter cold and a kindly man named Bill (James Remar), realizes she looks lost and cold and offers her a ride.

Bill and his wife Linda (Lauren Holly) take Joan in and, it turns out, they are on a very sad journey.

I don’t want to get into too many more details here (though I will after the SPOILER ALERT), but suffice to say these five characters and their stories will intersect before we reach the film’s end.

BD is, as I stated before, an elegant, well acted and well filmed movie which presents an admittedly fresh story… but, sadly, when all is said and done the film fails to sufficiently draw in this viewer (at least) and while I appreciate the care and thought behind the movie, it simply doesn’t present enough -and present it clearly enough- to get me to care.

Still, there is meat here and while I may feel this film is ultimately a whiff, Mr. Perkins shows considerable talent behind the camera, even if he’s a little better a director than a writer (again, IMHO).

So I can’t recommend BD even as I can commend Mr. Perkins for giving us something relatively new and interesting, even if it fails in the end to this viewer.

Now, on to…

 

SPOILER ALERTS!!!

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!!!

 

Still there?

You have been warned!

BD presents, in the end a very non-linear story.  It offers us scenes and then returns to them later in the film from a different character’s viewpoint which reveals to the audience just what was going on.

For example, Kat has a strange relationship with the heat furnace in the school’s basement, which is called back to later in the film.

But the one biggest reveal, which as I said before falls into Psycho territory, is that we find that “Joan” is not really who she says she is.  It turns out this woman strangled a woman in a bathroom and took her ID, which was indeed “Joan”.

For this “Joan” is Kat, nine years later.

Kat, it turns out, at the time her parents didn’t show up to get her all those years before, descended into some kind of a breakdown or -and this is where the film kinda lost me- was possessed by a demon.

Kat in time goes on a killing spree and takes out the two headmistresses/nuns living just outside the school before killing Rose who, moments before and in the bathroom had a period -again, something implied more than “shown” although in this case I’m OK with that!- and realized she wasn’t pregnant after all.

So nine years later Kat has managed to escape the insane asylum and is making her way back to the boarding school.  The people who picked her up, ironically enough, turn out to be Rose’s parents.  They are still in deep grief and are headed in that general direction to pay tribute to their lost daughter, unaware they have just picked up her daughter’s killer and will soon become victims of her just as their daughter was.

And Kat’s ultimate goal?

In the concluding moments of the film it is revealed that shortly after Kat was subdued a priest performed an exorcism on Kat and banished the demon that possessed her.

But Kat didn’t want it to go!

So she’s returning to the now boarded up school with her fresh victims (her first while “on her own”) and when she gets to the school and returns to the furnace where she first encountered the demon directly, she finds… nothing.

The furnace where she worshiped her personal demon is long cold.

The demon is long gone, banished forever.

And the disturbed Kat wandered back out to the road and cries.

Fin.

When watching the videos “explaining” what the movie is about, both I watched miss completely the fact that Rose finds out she’s not pregnant.  One of them seems to think that Kat and the school knew her parents were dead already (they most certainly did not) and missed the fact that when the headmaster and police officer come to the school later in the film, they’re obviously doing so to tell Kat her parents are dead, only to find Kat has gone on her bloody rampage.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter all that much. Indeed, the whole subplot involving Rose and her pregnancy/non-pregnancy are, in the end, not really all that important to the story, which makes me wonder if maybe this is yet another tribute to Psycho (Janet Leigh’s character’s story, which initially draw the viewer in, winds up being something of a red herring in the end).

So there you have it folks, a decent and potentially intriguing film that just missed for me.