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Tell me we can be together
Rabbit, rabbit. Happy May Day! It occurred to me only after the fact that I seem to have celebrated Walpurgisnacht this year.
The film I had to bolt for at the end of my marathon review of Johnny Eager (1942) was Oz Perkins' The Blackcoat's Daughter (2015), showing last night at the Brattle Theatre as part of IFFBoston. I liked it quite a lot and it is impossible to discuss any aspect of its effectiveness without extensive spoilers; even its genre is not apparent from its early scenes. The people who sat behind me were not very impressed with it, but that's all right, because I was not very impressed with their critical abilities. Specifically, they complained about the genre elements—they weren't shocked by the involvement of Satan, they weren't grossed out by the onscreen gore. "I've seen decapitated heads before!" This seemed to me to miss the point of the film entirely. The Blackcoat's Daughter is not horror because of any of its genre elements, though they include adolescence, trauma, possession, murder, and Catholic boarding school. It is horror because of the wasteland of loss it evokes; it is horror because it posits that a successful exorcism can be the worst outcome.
To the character who emerges as the protagonist, a first-year student recently and awfully bereaved of her parents, the possessing presence of Satan was a comfort. We never learn the details of her parents' deaths, but flashes of memory or vision suggest an annihilating tragedy. A thin, fair-haired, dark-browed girl with an enigmatic mouth and huge shadowy eyes, she has no apparent friends at her expensive, isolated school; the self-conscious efforts of adults to make contact run off her like rain. But the Devil was there for her. He talked to her on the phone. He came to watch her play piano. She worshipped him in the furnace room of her dormitory, convulsing like a marionette before the red-roaring iron grate; left on campus over February break with two nuns and one fellow student, she committed a series of gruesome murders to do him honor. Nine years later, having endured what looks from stutters of memory like alternating stints of psychiatric confinement and homeless drifting, she works her way back to long-abandoned Bramford on the anniversary of the killings, traveling with a pair of strangers who turn out to have the most intimate and apropos connection imaginable to her past. Of course she murders them. She severs their heads as she did with her original victims, carries them dripping bloodily in a suitcase across the snowy grounds, into the labyrinthine basement. She takes them to the furnace room. It's empty, cavernous, cold. The fire has gone out. She can't relight it with her cigarette lighter; she touches the flaking iron and it is winter-bitter to the touch. She arrays the heads before her altar, offering them in accordance with the ritual. And we flash back to the last moments of the past, when the school's priest recognized an old adversary in the terrified eye of a teenage girl and cast him out. The Devil is real in this universe, but so is the power of God. Satan is barred from her body. Kill as she might (as she may well have done before, though never before with such strength of sympathetic magic—this night, this place, these people), take trophies with her hands and sins onto her soul, she cannot call him back into her. He's locked out. She's alone. She knows it now. Aboveground, without the severed heads, without her lighter, without her knife, she cries desolately as the film goes hard to black.
It's wrenching. It's a take on demonic possession I have not seen before. Mephistopheles in reverse, the absence of the Devil is what pains her, not the presence or distance of God. And it is almost possible to construe the film's Satan as a hallucination, the product of a disturbed adolescent mind, except that an explanation which excluded the demonic would not account for some of the phenomena we witness, including the efficacy of the traditional Catholic exorcism. We even see him, or it, though never for long and never clearly: a shadow or a reflection, recognizable by the two short, curved horns that look almost rabbitlike except for their sharpness. No gender, no age, no humanity. A black cutout on the air. It vanishes during the exorcism and is not seen in any of the present-day scenes. "Don't go," she begged it, but it does. What should be the film's climactic moment of triumph—the freeing of a soul, the reaffirmed power of Christ—leaves her hollow all the rest of her days. You can't imagine what will happen to her after the credits if she stays alive.
My problem with the film is structural. The action takes place in three perspectives and two layers of time; the double-viewing of information in the past sections causes them to feel heavily switchbacked, although I believe all three are basically linear. (I put the timeline together around the halfway mark, but I am not sure if certain connections were intended to click into place later.) I can see the reasons for this distribution, but it means that the script devotes more time to material that turns out to be backstory than it does to events occurring in the present day and I think it would have been stronger with the ratios reversed. The audience needs firsthand experience of the original possession in order to parse the protagonist's later behavior, but much of the suspense drains from the past timeline as soon as we learn that one of the two students has not survived to the present day; after that it's just a matter of waiting. The most emotionally complex material belongs to the contemporary thread in any case, as the audience discovers that the protagonist and her fellow travelers are dealing with incompatible kinds of coring, life-derailing grief. With their complementary losses, they should be speaking the same language, but they barely even exist in the same world. "I can't even see you," one of them snaps dismissively, as though she's a phantom hitchhiker. They'd be in less danger from her if she were. The climax itself comes off with devastating precision, intercutting two sets of murders and their aftermath with the exorcism that explains why one was charged with the force of terrible sacrifice and the other leaves its perpetrator screaming through her reddened hands, trying to hold back an inconsolable grief. I am just not sure that the buildup had its background and foreground in the most effective focus.
For the record, considering that any audience with a glancing acquaintance with film history will recognize the director's parentage from his last name, I think it was pretty balls-out of him to structure his writing-directing debut around a brutal stabbing murder and dispatch a co-protagonist—at least in the audience's understanding—around the halfway mark. I have not said as much about her as I might, but there has to be some reason left for you to seek out the film on your own time, as I hope it's clear I am recommending. It's not a flawless movie, but it's a risky, powerful one. I didn't realize until I got home and was searching for a soundtrack album that The Blackcoat's Daughter made its first round of festival showings under the title February. I don't know the reasons for the change, but I find the later title more evocative, as well as more in keeping with the theme of parents and children to which almost every interaction in the script resonates. It's intelligently written, oblique without being obfuscatory. Nothing in the painterly, atmospheric narrative would hold together on more than an aesthetic level without the acting of Kiernan Shipka, Lucy Boynton, and Emma Roberts, all of whom I will be watching out for in future. The score is by Elvis Perkins and I hope it becomes commercially available. I will certainly watch whatever Oz Perkins does next. This winter's chill brought to you by my waiting backers at Patreon.
The film I had to bolt for at the end of my marathon review of Johnny Eager (1942) was Oz Perkins' The Blackcoat's Daughter (2015), showing last night at the Brattle Theatre as part of IFFBoston. I liked it quite a lot and it is impossible to discuss any aspect of its effectiveness without extensive spoilers; even its genre is not apparent from its early scenes. The people who sat behind me were not very impressed with it, but that's all right, because I was not very impressed with their critical abilities. Specifically, they complained about the genre elements—they weren't shocked by the involvement of Satan, they weren't grossed out by the onscreen gore. "I've seen decapitated heads before!" This seemed to me to miss the point of the film entirely. The Blackcoat's Daughter is not horror because of any of its genre elements, though they include adolescence, trauma, possession, murder, and Catholic boarding school. It is horror because of the wasteland of loss it evokes; it is horror because it posits that a successful exorcism can be the worst outcome.
To the character who emerges as the protagonist, a first-year student recently and awfully bereaved of her parents, the possessing presence of Satan was a comfort. We never learn the details of her parents' deaths, but flashes of memory or vision suggest an annihilating tragedy. A thin, fair-haired, dark-browed girl with an enigmatic mouth and huge shadowy eyes, she has no apparent friends at her expensive, isolated school; the self-conscious efforts of adults to make contact run off her like rain. But the Devil was there for her. He talked to her on the phone. He came to watch her play piano. She worshipped him in the furnace room of her dormitory, convulsing like a marionette before the red-roaring iron grate; left on campus over February break with two nuns and one fellow student, she committed a series of gruesome murders to do him honor. Nine years later, having endured what looks from stutters of memory like alternating stints of psychiatric confinement and homeless drifting, she works her way back to long-abandoned Bramford on the anniversary of the killings, traveling with a pair of strangers who turn out to have the most intimate and apropos connection imaginable to her past. Of course she murders them. She severs their heads as she did with her original victims, carries them dripping bloodily in a suitcase across the snowy grounds, into the labyrinthine basement. She takes them to the furnace room. It's empty, cavernous, cold. The fire has gone out. She can't relight it with her cigarette lighter; she touches the flaking iron and it is winter-bitter to the touch. She arrays the heads before her altar, offering them in accordance with the ritual. And we flash back to the last moments of the past, when the school's priest recognized an old adversary in the terrified eye of a teenage girl and cast him out. The Devil is real in this universe, but so is the power of God. Satan is barred from her body. Kill as she might (as she may well have done before, though never before with such strength of sympathetic magic—this night, this place, these people), take trophies with her hands and sins onto her soul, she cannot call him back into her. He's locked out. She's alone. She knows it now. Aboveground, without the severed heads, without her lighter, without her knife, she cries desolately as the film goes hard to black.
It's wrenching. It's a take on demonic possession I have not seen before. Mephistopheles in reverse, the absence of the Devil is what pains her, not the presence or distance of God. And it is almost possible to construe the film's Satan as a hallucination, the product of a disturbed adolescent mind, except that an explanation which excluded the demonic would not account for some of the phenomena we witness, including the efficacy of the traditional Catholic exorcism. We even see him, or it, though never for long and never clearly: a shadow or a reflection, recognizable by the two short, curved horns that look almost rabbitlike except for their sharpness. No gender, no age, no humanity. A black cutout on the air. It vanishes during the exorcism and is not seen in any of the present-day scenes. "Don't go," she begged it, but it does. What should be the film's climactic moment of triumph—the freeing of a soul, the reaffirmed power of Christ—leaves her hollow all the rest of her days. You can't imagine what will happen to her after the credits if she stays alive.
My problem with the film is structural. The action takes place in three perspectives and two layers of time; the double-viewing of information in the past sections causes them to feel heavily switchbacked, although I believe all three are basically linear. (I put the timeline together around the halfway mark, but I am not sure if certain connections were intended to click into place later.) I can see the reasons for this distribution, but it means that the script devotes more time to material that turns out to be backstory than it does to events occurring in the present day and I think it would have been stronger with the ratios reversed. The audience needs firsthand experience of the original possession in order to parse the protagonist's later behavior, but much of the suspense drains from the past timeline as soon as we learn that one of the two students has not survived to the present day; after that it's just a matter of waiting. The most emotionally complex material belongs to the contemporary thread in any case, as the audience discovers that the protagonist and her fellow travelers are dealing with incompatible kinds of coring, life-derailing grief. With their complementary losses, they should be speaking the same language, but they barely even exist in the same world. "I can't even see you," one of them snaps dismissively, as though she's a phantom hitchhiker. They'd be in less danger from her if she were. The climax itself comes off with devastating precision, intercutting two sets of murders and their aftermath with the exorcism that explains why one was charged with the force of terrible sacrifice and the other leaves its perpetrator screaming through her reddened hands, trying to hold back an inconsolable grief. I am just not sure that the buildup had its background and foreground in the most effective focus.
For the record, considering that any audience with a glancing acquaintance with film history will recognize the director's parentage from his last name, I think it was pretty balls-out of him to structure his writing-directing debut around a brutal stabbing murder and dispatch a co-protagonist—at least in the audience's understanding—around the halfway mark. I have not said as much about her as I might, but there has to be some reason left for you to seek out the film on your own time, as I hope it's clear I am recommending. It's not a flawless movie, but it's a risky, powerful one. I didn't realize until I got home and was searching for a soundtrack album that The Blackcoat's Daughter made its first round of festival showings under the title February. I don't know the reasons for the change, but I find the later title more evocative, as well as more in keeping with the theme of parents and children to which almost every interaction in the script resonates. It's intelligently written, oblique without being obfuscatory. Nothing in the painterly, atmospheric narrative would hold together on more than an aesthetic level without the acting of Kiernan Shipka, Lucy Boynton, and Emma Roberts, all of whom I will be watching out for in future. The score is by Elvis Perkins and I hope it becomes commercially available. I will certainly watch whatever Oz Perkins does next. This winter's chill brought to you by my waiting backers at Patreon.
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It really impressed me!
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I've never seen anything like it on film. I don't even think I've seen it in written fiction. It's very well done—and it is necessary to withhold the exorcism until the very last minute in order for it to have its full effect. Before then, it looks like your standard possession story, right down to the profanity and the inability to repeat words of prayer without adverse physical response; we imagine her a puppet for the Devil, a string-pulled toy to wear and discard and potentially destroy. Watching the protagonist's disjointed behavior in the present day, we wonder if she's still possessed, if the Devil is still inside her, lurking, threatening the unsuspecting strangers with whom she's thrown in her lot. This is the expected narrative. As I write it out, I realize that it is a narrative in which the protagonist does not have much agency. As it turns out, she has quite a lot of agency, and that's the danger and the tragedy of the story. She's not forced to do anything in the present day. She's trying to recapture something that, violent, blasphemous, and terrible as it may have been, kept her company at a time in her life when she was dreadfully alone. That which was meant to heal and protect her only bereaved her again. I wasn't sure what kind of movie I was watching until she entered the furnace room for the last time and it was cold and ordinary, no Moloch-fire, no Satanic shadows on the wall. Then it was astonishing.
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IMDb claims it goes into wide release in the U.S. in July, so I hope you get the chance!
(Personally I would have released it in winter, preferably February, but I have no idea how these things are determined.)
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I hope it comes to a theater near you! IMDb claims it goes into wide release in July.
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What sounds compelling here is the fact of the human loving and depending on the Devil. It sounds like a very strong portrayal of one of the kinds of personality that would become a Satan-worshiper. I'm sure there might be people drawn to it by Rugged Individualism or nasty temperaments or what not, but that kind of quid pro quo worship--I do these things for you, you give me successes and love--is the kind of thing that makes sense to a kid who wants the perfect friend.
Your descriptions are also making me think of Mrs. Powers from An Enemy at Green Knowe, who is a very scary person but who is pathetic in her last moments. Her personal devil finally abandons her, kicks her and runs away. She goes blundering down the street, looking sick and not seeing clearly, saying, "I've lost my Cat. I've lost my Cat."
That seems like the climax of this film, in a way: the worshipper can't call the Devil back, no matter what they do. I find that heartbreaking. No matter how nasty the worshipper is, it's sad when they lose their deity. Like watching a painful breakup or a horrible fight or anybody crying who is inconsolable.
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See above—it's supposed to get a theatrical release this summer. I think you would like it a lot.
This is the second such film (after The Witch) that I've seen good things about and missed in the theaters. Need to get the lead out.
If it helps, The Blackcoat's Daughter played only one night for IFFBoston and it was not at all apparent going into it (a) that its theme was demonic possession rather than human craziness (b) that it would take the tack on demonic possession that it did. I realized while talking about the film on Dreamwidth that it plays heavily on the audience's familiarity with possession narratives, therefore on the audience's assumptions of the protagonist's agency, which the finale will revise suddenly and heartbreakingly. She may not have asked for Satan to enter her life, but once she had him, Satan was damn well better than nobody.
It would make a great double feature with The Witch, though.
I find that heartbreaking. No matter how nasty the worshipper is, it's sad when they lose their deity. Like watching a painful breakup or a horrible fight or anybody crying who is inconsolable.
Yes. She's not innocent, but that doesn't mean she's not in pain. The nature of what she's lost doesn't change the desolation of losing it.
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Or Aunt Rhoda, in Josephine Poole's Moon Eyes, who disappoints her own familiar demon and is abandoned/consumed by it, in like fashion. I always remember the words which enter our heroine's brain during the book's climax, so she'll know why her hitherto implacable enemy is weeping:
Oh, I have long, I long
To serve faithfully.
And you have wronged, are wrong,
In turning from me.
How I have tried, I try,
To work your pleasure.
Yet you pass by, and by
Passes my treasure.
All that I do, have done,
After my master,
Yet when I come, you run
Always the faster.
Now having lost, I lose,
I am bereft.
Be not crossed by one without use.
Take what is left.
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Take what is left.
I should read this book, I think.
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Last night I read a novel from 1960 and a novel from 1950 the night before that. Sometimes I'm in the wrong decade!
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There are certain images that can always scare me, and one of them is the older female authority figure who is sweet and sensible and comes across as the soul of good judgment and righteousness... and *only you know* that Darling Aunt Lizzie actually intends to eat you in a pie, or sell you to Satan, or amputate your free will, or something. Just the plot summary of "Moon Eyes" frightens me, so I can tell it's going to hit me on the same spot.
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That really does sound like a powerful reinterpretation or re-visioning of a possession story.
I do think in our lonely age, and maybe in the past too (maybe all ages are/were lonely?), the intimacy of possession has a definite appeal (this is separate from its sexual/romantic appeal). Of course it's meant also to be supremely harmful and not the comfort from loneliness that the possessee is wishing for--if you're going for orthodoxy, anyway, but who is?
What's really devastating is, as you say, to vanquish the devil and offer nothing as a replacement. That's a great metaphor for how society treats, oh, say, addiction: get rid of the addiction, but don't offer any of the wholesome, supportive things that would make it possible for a person to grow strong and happy. That really is horror, and it's a quite conceivable one, unfortunately.
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Yes. When I described the plot to my mother, she thought at the least therapy should have been in order.
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(The structure did unreservedly work for me, actually -- the sense of past and present running simultaneously.)
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I don't think it's peculiar at all: I am honored to have been the vector by which you found this movie and I really appreciate you telling me so. And I'm glad the structure just worked for you! I seem to keep recommending the movie regardless in any conversation where it's even faintly relevant. I have still never seen Shipka in anything else and I still think about her performance. If it is of interest to you, the soundtrack was eventually released.