The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015)
I have never been much of a ‘believer’; in fact, I have had trouble with the very notion of ‘faith’, which seems to imply a subject attempting to justify one’s judgments and actions solely based upon the intensity of one’s will, rather than the result of the critical assessment of what can be thought and stated clearly. Given that, even with the best available analytical clarity, our epistemic limitation naturally prevents us from penetrating the ‘Fog of Life’, if you will, and leaves us to the caprice of chance, it is perplexing that we often allow ourselves to live by a set of subjective beliefs comprised by inconsistent, and often mutually contradictory, statements that may have little or no bearing upon the state of affairs.
Whilst I can see how my professed scepticism might offend, I also find it perfectly reasonable; after all, history is littered with self-inflicted catastrophes resulting from misjudgments that led us to do the unthinkable. Despite what a sound situational analysis might have shown us, we prefer to listen to the wind and follow the shortest path to the promised land. Hence, one might say: the great calamity follows the moment of soaring revelation that directs us to the shining object of desire, whatever that may be.
Whilst it is not particularly difficult to accept such human fallibility as a fact, it is tortuous to watch this ‘malaise’ endure despite ourselves.
It is tortuous not because this particular fallibility is constitutive to the sensorily passive and intellectually discursive creatures like ‘us’; it is because of our belief that we need to, and indeed we can, somehow eliminate the human fallibility altogether, the belief that we must become something we are not; the belief that we need something to help us ‘overcome’ ourselves. It is tortuous to witness because this belief in the grand rejection is just that: a belief. And, since it is a belief, not a mere daydream, it has a regulatory power over a believer, rendering the subject devoid of agency when it comes to the said belief, for a belief exists in a space wherein the possibility of critical investigations is categorically denied.
Hence, this self-insulating act endures despite our belief in the self-enlightenment. We believe in growth and coming of age. We all hope to uncover the ‘Truth’. Therefore, every story-arch describes the liberation of the protagonist from deceptions. And yet, this belief in human potential is just that: a belief. And, it must be said that the ‘Truth’ and the ‘enlightenment’ that we ‘attain’, more often than not, becomes the catalyst of a new belief. Since this is perhaps the darkest fact about a common human behaviour, that is, something that we wish to keep in the dark, we hardly ever come across a story about the enduring Gewalt (Force/Violence) that believing has over us.
Osgood (also as known as ‘Oz’) Perkins’ debut film, The Blackcoat’s Daughter (also known as February, 2015), represents such a rare instance; it offers a sobering take on the curious resilience of ‘faith’ that endures even in the face of a devastating loss. What is more, this acclaimed film shows us not only how the desiring might rein us, but where it will lead us, and leave us.
(If you wish to read on, kindly note that this article would not be possible without revealing the plot. This film’s success heavily relies on some aspects of the plot unrevealed for the majority of the viewing time. Naturally, what to do with this information is entirely up to the readers: please continue on if you like, or please wait until when you see it unfold yourself.)
As the alternate title suggests, the story is set in the dead of winter. At a prestigious Catholic boarding school, Bramford Academy, located in the Upstate New York, two students, Katherine (Kiernan Spika) and Rose (Lucy Boynton), were left behind with a pair of nuns as the school is closed for a week-long break. Two students were stranded there for different reasons. Kat’s parents simply failed to show, and she cannot reach them despite multiple, and increasingly anxious, attempts. The freshman is thus in limbo, left at the mercy of debilitating angst. Rose’s case is entirely different; her parents were delayed just as she planned. The senior student suspects that she is pregnant. Having decided to terminate her pregnancy in secret, she gave her parents a wrong date for the pick-up, hoping to cover up the affair and spend her winter recess as if nothing happened. Unlike Katherine, Rose knows what she is doing and, seemingly, she is in full control of her fate. Whilst she is not happy about the unplanned pregnancy, her trouble only amounts to a mere annoyance. She will ‘take care’ of the situation, have time for herself for a week, break up with her boyfriend, endure the reminder of her school year, graduate, and move on. After all, she is young, charming, and from a comfortable family. What could happen to a girl like her?
Then, there is another young woman stranded in the frozen desolation. Having taken off a Greyhound, the woman called ‘Joan’ (Emma Roberts) goes inside the bus station, locks herself in a restroom. From her flashbacks, one can gather that she slipped out of a mental health institution. She rips her patient identification band from her wrist and discards it. She examines a map; it appears that she has a clear destination in mind: Bramford. The destination suggests that she could be an alumnus of the said boarding school, or someone discharged from it due to her mental health, although her present mental state as well as her motive in choosing this particular destination remains obscure (Given that this film belongs to the ever popular genre of ‘horror’, the possible range of explanation to the reasons why she wishes to go to Bramford is wildly broad). She then goes to a pay-phone and calls a number: the automated response indicates that the number has not been used for a very long time and is no longer connected to the network. She eventually sits alone on one of the waiting benches for the bus outside. Yet, in the midst of freezing desolation, the relief is at hand; a middle-aged man (James Remar) walks by and asks if she needs a ride.
What follows is a masterfully rendered cinema of dread. Despite the bare-bone sets, the controlled pace and the moody cinematography gradually build a sense of profound unease that gradually affects your psyche. Perkins, despite the constraints, has managed to create a proper Gothic film out of unremarkable space: an ordinary modern school building; a Greyhound bus stop; a cheap motel; and a drive-in diner in the middle of nowhere. The controlled acting of the three protagonists enhances the understated aesthetics. The human opacity embodied by these young women reveals an unnerving fact: it is not a supernatural being that we must be wary of; it is the psyche of the surrounding persons that must be feared.
There is hardly anything that I wish to be different in this film. The only deficit that merits the mention is: Perkins falls back on the supernatural horror clichés at pivotal moments. Lamentably, Perkins allows the shadow of the ‘demon’ to appear on-screen on a few occasions, and, in one scene, Katherine’s body contorts à la Exorcist. Since these images were very discreetly introduced, and they remain suggestive enough to preserve the aesthetic integrity of the film, I cannot help but to imagine alternative solutions, something similar to what Bergman came up to create some of the most terrifying instances for his cinema, such as the moment when the shadow and the noise of a landing helicopter assaults us in Through the Glass Darkly; the empty, indifferent darkness that confronts us when Antonius Block demands the ‘possessed’ woman the proof of the demon that safeguards her in The Seventh Seal; the moment when Johan Borg encounters the body of his past lover in Hour of the Wolf, to name a few.
Whilst, naturally, it is not fair for anyone to be compared with Bergman, I lament nonetheless a missed opportunity in The Blackcoat’s Daughter, for it represents a possibility for the contemporary cinema: in the time wherein every project is neatly pigeonholed into a respective genre, Perkins skilfully demonstrates the path to overcome the tyranny of the market by elevating the viewers’ perception of a given genre in which he is supposedly partaking. If he has done away with these standard devices entirely, he could have helped in establishing within Hollywood a ‘sub-genre’ of aesthetically sophisticated and imaginatively charged psychological ‘horror’ drama. Whilst the said film in this current form is not going to reach the lofty hight of Only God Forgives (Nicolas Winding Refn) and Get Out (Jordan Peele), I reckon that Perkins could have done far better if he did not falter in these moments.
Still, the direction is undoubtedly masterful, and the structure within which the narrative unfolds is particularly effective: it not only springs a shocking twist, but offers the indispensable structural support for the narrative. Whilst ‘Joan’’, as in The Shining, appears to be on her way to save the stranded students from the evil, ‘Joan’, in fact, is the Katherine: she broke out of a mental institution and is on her way back to the site of worship. Nine years ago, Katherine sacrificed Rose and two nuns to the ‘devil’, whom she called the ‘Headmaster’. Nearly a decade later, she is on her way back to her ‘guardian’ who, despite her plea, had ‘left’ her behind during the exorcism performed by the school pastor who visited her in the solitary confinement. She now has a second chance to prove herself worthy; she is happening to be chauffeured by no-other than Rose’s parents.
At the scene of crime wherein Rose was brutally murdered, ‘Joan’ stabs her parents, decapitates them, and brings the offering to her ‘alter’ where she faces the hard, cold truth: the ‘Headmaster’ has deserted her, and she cannot bring him back. The cinema closes by showing the lone woman breaking down in the frozen landscape.
Whilst it is not impossible to speculate that Katherine/Joan’s desolate display is the result of her finally comprehending her delusion and guilt, it is unlikely that the protagonist has regained the capacity for reason and the empathy for her innocent victims. The cry of this woman strikes us hard precisely because of its solipsism: she is crying because she is ‘abandoned’ by her imaginary ‘guardian’. She is inconsolable because she was left helplessly and indefinitely alone in the world. There is no tear for the dead.
The solipsism that persists for the span of nine years and endures in the face of the devastating disillusion is truly terrible to watch. Katherine/Joan believes that she was abandoned by her parents first when she was sent to the boarding school; she believes that she was once again abandoned when they died. She also believes that she was abandoned by the school pastor when he left before her scheduled school performance. Furthermore, she believes that the headmaster (not the imaginary one) abandoned her when he left her with nuns and an indifferent senior student, Rose, who in turn left her to her own devices in the deserted school building.
Whilst it may be of the interest for some to speculate about the exact nature and the development of her mental health crisis, that is not the scope of this article. What we need to focus here is one fact: Katherine/Joan allows herself to believe without giving herself a benefit of doubt, and, more importantly, allows her belief to endure the devastating moment of possible revelation. The belief with which she has insulated herself has allowed her to do the unthinkable, had denied everyone involved what life could have offered, and, finally, has left her in the frozen, senseless world. Unable to break from the delusion and accept her guilts, Katherine/Joan’ suffers another ‘loss’, and thus, her solipsism remains intact.
In this sense, the story ends precisely where it began: Katherine is once again alone, in February, after nine long years.
Only, her isolation now feels colder, darker, and infinitely more unbearable.