The Blackcoat’s Daughter: Left Behind

Okay, so this week I’m ending up as far away from last week as I can get. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but as I’m sitting here thinking about this week’s film, I realize that it is in a lot of ways the stylistic opposite of last week’s entry. By and large, Apollo 18 looked like actual found footage, but relied a little too much on horror-film clichés in the third act to gin up any tension or feelings of threat, which undercut the whole thing. You could say it lacked…atmosphere.

(I know, I know. I know.)

By contrast, The Blackcoat’s Daughter has atmosphere in spades. It’s stylish, patient, and suffused with slowly mounting dread culminating in a haunting conclusion.

This film is the story of Katherine, Rose, and Joan. Katherine and Rose - both teenagers - are students at a small boarding school for girls in rural New York, and Joan, in her early 20s, has just been released from the hospital for reasons that aren’t immediately clear. When the film opens, Katherine has just had a strange dream in which her father (an unseen figure in a black coat) shows her his badly wrecked car with her mother inside, and Rose is telling a friend of hers that she’s missed her period, and now she has to think about the possibility that she’s pregnant, all set against the school’s annual parents’ weekend, which begins the school’s winter break. Joan, freshly discharged from the hospital, fumbles with her ID bracelet in a bus station bathroom, tries to call a number that turns out to be disconnected, and then, inadequately clothed against the winter snow, sits forlornly at a bus stop.

Katherine and Rose are both called to the headmaster’s office. He has to go out of town on some personal business and unfortunately won’t be there for the weekend. Katherine is upset that he won’t be there for her performance at the parents’ assembly, and he notes that neither Rose’s nor Katherine’s parents have come for the weekend. Rose assures the headmaster that her parents were just confused and would be headed up in a day’s time. Katherine seems less sure why her parents aren’t there.

Outside of the bus station, a man pulls up and offers Joan a ride.

First and foremost, this film sets a very specific mood. Everything is very quiet and still and slightly outside of time - the only real nods to modernity are the models of cars we can see and a few references to cellphones, but otherwise this could be the 1950s or 1980s or 2000s, it’s very hard to tell. This is reinforced by dialogue that is mannered, if not quite stilted, as we might expect to hear people talk in a period drama. It’s a girls’ boarding school, so there is in those scenes a definite feeling of manners and propriety, like a less lurid take on Picnic At Hanging Rock, and that contributes to the timeless feeling.

That said, it’s interesting in how as the film moves on and we learn more and more about what’s going, that opacity increasingly falls away - facades crumble, feelings are revealed, and what starts off as something slightly ethereal becomes more and more grounded, making the horror of what is happening that much more impactful. There are long stretches without any music at all, and what music is in the film is largely ambient swells and industrial hums. So, if anything, it’s sort of Picnic At Hanging Rock by way of David Lynch, which is no bad thing in my book. There are a lot of long, still shots of dimly lit hallways and snowy exteriors, communicating a world away from the hustle and bustle of big cities as seen in the smallest of hours. And in that world, there is something evil, if only one knows where to look.

It isn’t immediately apparent what these people have to do with each other - Katherine and Rose don’t know each other very well, and it isn’t clear what Joan’s role in all of this is. What this film does very well is take this very specific world and specific atmosphere it has created and tell a story through gradually unfolding events, showing us the points at which everyone’s perspectives converge and diverge, moving between different points of view. Katherine and Rose, despite the headmaster’s instructions that they cannot stay at school over the break unsupervised, appear to have been stranded by their parents. Stranded here, in the middle of the country in the dead of winter, in this place out of time. We get fragments of Joan’s past - doctors and nurses looming over her, medication administered, a gunshot, but not much else. She isn’t very forthcoming. Everything is just elliptical enough to maintain the air of mystery and uncertainty established by the setting, the camerawork, and the sound.

But, as the film goes on, we get more information. We see what Katherine, Rose, and Joan see, and the reasons for their situation become increasingly more and more clear. As we’re getting more details, the details we get become more and more unsettling - at first it’s little things, creeping in around the edges, and then in the third act everything and everyone starts to converge, and the tension, so carefully built up over the course of the film, spikes as the audience has enough to put two and two together, to understand exactly who everyone is and what they’ve done. And there is the horror that has been promised by the details revealed to us but also, finally, a sense of overwhelming loneliness, isolation, and grief that you wouldn’t necessarily see coming. Something terrible happened, is still happening, and cannot be undone.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Available from Amazon