Premise: Two girls wait at their boarding school during winter break because their parents are both running late. Then, creepy things start happening.
Often, I forget to appreciate the base hits while I'm looking for a home run. I tend to watch movies looking for my next favorite rather than a good way to spend two hours. I do my best to catch myself. I forget a lot though. Partly that's because it's a lot easier to write raves or about abject failures. Merely good movies are tricky.
The Blackcoat's Daughter is a good horror movie. The cast is stellar. A lot of recognizable faces but no one who is so famous that they get plot armor throughout. Emma Roberts is the only one I had to pause and ask if she's "too big" for the movie, but I think I have an inflated impression of her fame. Kiernan Shipka, only 16 at the time, was still just Sally from Mad Men when this was filmed. Lucy Boynton was still doing bit parts in shows and small movies. So yeah, anything could happen to these characters. The three-prong storytelling is interesting. They were able to maximize it for tension and mystery effectively. It doesn't hold the audience's hand to explain everything. As I mentioned, this is a base hit. It works without being a classic. If you want a horror movie, this will satisfy.
It's a twisty movie, which I'll discuss now. So, if you are reading this for some reason without having watched the movie, be warned. I was confused about both what the twist was and when it happened. Like, when is the audience supposed to realize that Emma Roberts is an older Kiernan Shipka? I assumed it as soon as we saw Boynton's father's picture of his daughter, since they mentioned it was several years ago that she died. I thought the movie wasn't being subtle about that, however it kept dropping more hints like it didn't think the audience realized that Roberts was Shipka. By the time they explicitly say they are the same person, I couldn't figure out if they really thought that would be a surprise. And I'm confused about what was going on with her. Why the boiler room? Why decapitations? Why is "The Blackcoat's Daughter" the title? I'm very confused about a lot of this. She had a demonic possession but she might also be crazy? Or did she think killing the parents would bring the demon back? Did the demon cause her parents' deaths? I get the base levels of all of this. I like the aspect of the ending where Roberts feels truly alone now since she can't get the demon back. They needed to spell a couple more things out for me though. I have a lot of questions still.
Verdict: Weakly Recommend
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