A Boarding School for the Damned and the Depressed
Osgood Perkins’ The Blackcoat’s Daughter (also known as February, for those who prefer their horror films to sound like indie poetry slams) is what happens when you mix Catholic guilt, teen angst, and a light seasoning of Satanism. The result is a slow-burn psychological horror film so cold, so unsettling, and so beautifully bleak that you almost want to hug it—before realizing it would probably stab you mid-embrace.
It’s a film about loneliness that feels like it was filmed inside a snow globe filled with despair. Set in a Catholic boarding school during winter break, The Blackcoat’s Daughter follows three women—Kat, Rose, and Joan—whose stories unfold like an exorcism written by Sylvia Plath. It’s eerie, elegant, and just pretentious enough to make you feel smarter for liking it.
The Devil Wears Plaid: Kiernan Shipka’s Possession of the Year
Let’s start with the obvious: Kiernan Shipka (yes, the little witch from Mad Men and later Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) carries this movie like a demonic valedictorian. As Kat, she’s the kind of freshman you’d never invite to lunch—quiet, polite, and radiating the energy of someone who’s been whispering Latin to the boiler room.
Shipka plays haunted with an unnerving stillness. When Kat finally starts contorting, vomiting, and taking career advice from a horned shadow demon, it’s almost a relief—you’re glad she’s finally expressing herself. Watching her transformation from shy student to full-blown Satanic murder prodigy is like witnessing puberty gone horribly right.
Perkins wisely never overplays the possession angle. There’s no spinning heads, no cheap scares, no priests flying through walls. Just a teenage girl and her invisible friend, Satan, bonding over shared parental trauma.
Emma Roberts: Sad, Bad, and Beautifully Broken
Enter Emma Roberts as Joan, a mysterious drifter hitchhiking through a snowstorm. She’s fragile, intense, and armed with the kind of emotional instability that makes you want to wrap her in a blanket and maybe call the authorities. Roberts gives a career-best performance here—understated, desperate, and terrifying in its quiet.
At first, Joan seems like a lost soul trying to find her way. Then the pieces start to click: the scar on her shoulder, the flashbacks, the casual laughter when she learns about Rose’s death. By the time the film reveals that Joan is Kat nine years later, it’s both shocking and inevitable—like realizing your therapist has been Satan all along.
Roberts’ portrayal of adult Kat is hauntingly sympathetic. You can’t help but pity her even as she commits unspeakable acts. She’s not possessed anymore—just hollow, clawing at the memory of the only thing that ever made her feel alive: her demon. Some people miss their exes; Joan misses Lucifer. We’ve all been there.
Lucy Boynton: The Gothic Babysitter of Doom
Lucy Boynton’s Rose rounds out the trio, a senior who’s more concerned with a potential pregnancy than demonic activity. She’s stylish, sarcastic, and tragically human—the perfect counterpoint to Kat’s creeping insanity. Boynton, with her porcelain features and doe-eyed melancholy, looks like she wandered out of a Tim Burton movie and into Catholic purgatory.
Her scenes with Kat pulse with quiet dread. When Rose finds Kat bowing before the boiler, muttering sweet nothings to the Prince of Darkness, her reaction isn’t fear—it’s annoyance. Classic senior energy. Unfortunately for Rose, her final confrontation with Kat doesn’t end with a lecture about safe sex; it ends with decapitation.
Osgood Perkins: Son of Norman, Prophet of Doom
If The Blackcoat’s Daughter feels like it’s directed by someone with hereditary trauma about cold institutions and distant parents—it is. Osgood Perkins, son of Psycho legend Anthony Perkins, brings a uniquely neurotic elegance to his debut film. His direction is slow, deliberate, and patient to the point of sadism.
Perkins builds horror not through jump scares, but through silence. The camera lingers too long, the snow falls too gently, and the sound design hums like a heartbeat you can’t quite place. It’s less a horror film and more a séance conducted in cinematic form.
And yet, there’s humor here—dark, dry, and cruel. The film seems self-aware of its own glacial pacing, almost daring the audience to complain. Each moment feels like it’s whispering, If you’re bored, maybe you should be scared instead.
Elvis Perkins’ Score: Satan’s Elevator Music
The score, composed by Osgood’s brother Elvis Perkins (because apparently this family holds creative monopolies on trauma), is a whisper of strings, distant hums, and unnerving silences. It’s the kind of soundtrack that makes you feel watched by the wallpaper.
Instead of overwhelming the scenes, the music slithers beneath them, like something unholy crawling under the skin of the movie. It doesn’t tell you when to be afraid—it just reminds you that fear is already in the room.
A24: Patron Saint of Existential Horror
It’s fitting that A24 distributed The Blackcoat’s Daughter. No one makes misery look this stylish. The studio that brought us Hereditary, The Witch, and Midsommar has a knack for films where grief and horror slow-dance to the sound of whispering demons.
The box office may have been a whopping $38,000 (which probably covered one week of snow machine rental), but this is peak A24 energy: beautifully made, criminally under-seen, and guaranteed to ruin your sleep cycle.
The Horror of Loneliness
At its core, The Blackcoat’s Daughter isn’t really about possession—it’s about the terror of being alone. Kat doesn’t just lose her parents; she loses her connection to everything human. The devil doesn’t tempt her with power or lust. He tempts her with attention.
When she finally exorcises the demon, she’s left with nothing but silence. So she kills again, not out of evil, but out of heartbreak. The final scene—Joan sobbing in the snow, clutching her emptiness—is one of the most devastating endings in modern horror. It’s not Satan she misses. It’s feeling wanted.
In a genre obsessed with survival, The Blackcoat’s Daughter quietly suggests that maybe surviving isn’t always the prize. Sometimes, the true horror is being left behind.
A Cold Masterpiece That Burns Slowly
Is The Blackcoat’s Daughter slow? Absolutely. It’s like watching a glacier murder people. But beneath its frozen exterior lies a film of staggering depth and control. Every shot is deliberate, every silence loaded, every scream earned.
It’s a horror movie for people who think therapy costs too much. A meditation on loss, faith, and the desperate ways we cling to meaning. And if you happen to enjoy your horror films sprinkled with existential dread and Catholic trauma, congratulations—you’ve found your comfort movie.
Final Verdict: Satanic Stillness and the Beauty of Despair
Osgood Perkins doesn’t give you the comfort of catharsis. He gives you a girl praying to a furnace and dares you to look away. The Blackcoat’s Daughter is not a film that shouts—it whispers, then laughs when you lean in too close.
It’s haunting, intelligent, and wickedly restrained. Like the devil himself, it’s patient. It doesn’t need to scare you right away; it knows you’ll be thinking about it later, in the dark, wondering why the boiler just turned on by itself.
Final Score: 9/10
A frostbitten masterpiece of melancholy and madness. A horror film that proves sometimes the scariest thing in the world isn’t Satan—it’s being ghosted by him.
