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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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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.