This past Thursday evening I eagerly made my way to my local Cineplex to check out the much-talked-about Longlegs. I’d avoided spoilers across the interwebs, except to hear the rumblings that Longlegs was the horror film of the year, yadda yadda yadda. You know, it’s the type of hype that would absolutely get me into the theater. Which, when I arrived, was absolutely packed, showing that the hype machine for what I thought would be a small horror flick was doing its job and getting butts into seats.
The fact that, when the film finished, I found myself pretty nonplussed about the whole thing, is in a lot of ways pretty irrelevant.
Yes, Longlegs didn’t do much for me when it came to horror. Like my good friend Sachin Hingoo wrote in his Saturday at the Movies review, there’s so much to like about the movie, and I agree with a vast majority of what my colleague felt. Where we differ is that Longlegs simply never hit me the way that I’d hoped. Though I was often riveted by what I was watching, including the work from the vast majority of the cast, I was never really scared by anything, and that’s what I was hoping for.
However, even out of some cinematic disappointment can come great things for a movie fan. In this case, even though I didn’t love Longlegs, it made me curious to explore the work of writer-director Osgood Perkins. Call me a bad horror fan if you want, but I’d never watched any of his previous films, and I could tell from Longlegs that his is a unique voice in the genre. I had to find out what I’d been missing, and, wouldn’t you know it, Perkins’ 2015 film The Blackcoat’s Daughter came up immediately when I was searching through Prime Video. I instantly hit play, knowing not a thing about the film.
And I wasn’t disappointed. Not at all.
It seems to me the best way to go into The Blackcoat’s Daughter, assuming you’re like me and haven’t seen the film, is to not know much, if anything about it at all. What I’ll reveal is that the movie is the story of three women – two students (Kiernan Shipka and Lucy Boynton) who are awaiting the arrival for their parents to pick them up from their boarding school for winter break, and a third (Emma Roberts) who is picked up by a couple (James Remar and Lauren Holly) as she tries to make her way to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. That’s all you need or should know, other than maybe the fact that shit happens.
I absolutely loved The Blackcoat’s Daughter. The performances from the five main actors are all superb, with Shipka particularly impressive as Katherine, the youngest of the two students, who seems lost in the solitude of virtually empty school. There’s not a wrong note from any of the actors, whose work is highlighted by the disquiet that director Perkins places them in. Throughout the film, there are uncomfortable silences, disturbing noises, scant musical cues that serve to ratchet up the tension when they appear. Speaking of tension, there is a palpable sense of it virtually from the get go, and it never really let up for me through the 94 minutes of The Blackcoat’s Daughter. I felt uncomfortable while watching the film and I can vividly recall shivers going through me at certain moments. That sort of feeling is one that I look for when watching a horror movie. I’m an easy mark and love a good jump scare, but The Blackcoat’s Daughter isn’t that sort of film; in lieu of the jumps, I’ll gladly take discomfort, which the movie had in abundance.
There’s some serious connective tissue between Longlegs and The Blackcoat’s Daughter, thematic and performance wise, and both could have netted the same reaction out of me. That’s where hype and the social machine worked against the former for me, I think. I went into The Blackcoat’s Daughter without any expectations whatsoever, and came out the other end satisfied and then some. Meanwhile, the personal expectations I had out of Longlegs maybe couldn’t have been met.
In the end, both films are worth watching, but I highly suggest if you’re a horror fan and, like me, have never watched The Blackcoat’s Daughter, you should go and correct that mistake posthaste. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
