Perfectly adorable

Excellent, a Must See

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

Virtually no storyline, plenty of overlong "art" shots and obvious rips from actual horror flicks - all are predictable products of a writer who is also the director. In this scenario, nobody is available to challenge whether the artiste's vision is coherent, let alone interesting or entertaining. Tripe results.

But ultimately falls flat. There was nothing gripping or interesting in this film. The music was horrendous - that alone was a big turn-off. Why use two actresses to play the same person when they almost appear to be the same age anyway (9 years difference supposedly)?All in all a big disappointment. 3 stars for the effort to be different.

This is a movie you will have to watch twice for sure to truly understand it but that's OK because you will want to watch it again anyway. I watched it twice back to back and was even more riveted the second go around. This is a superb satanic movie with all of the necessary ingredients to make it one. The acting is very good across the board but especially true for the actors playing the characters of Kat, Rose and Joan. The soundtrack (score) was equally superb and added tremendously to the film. Some seem to think it was distracting but I thought it very enhancing from start to finish. I very nearly gave this movie a 10 and frankly I'm not sure what made me shave off a star/point. It's a movie you have to pay attention to because it jumps around quite a bit and utilizes flashbacks. All in all I think the film was quite masterfully done. If you have a short attention span or are someone that likes fast paced action and a film that starts at "A" and ends at "Z" without any sort of zig zagging around...you probably should skip this one. If you don't enjoy a movie that requires some thinking and puzzle solving then again, this is one you should probably skip. I wanted to write a review without any spoilers but that's sort of difficult because it's the ending that's still got me puzzled. I'm going to watch the movie again in a week or two and see if I still believe what I think is happening to Kat/Joan in the last scene is really what I think is going on. I think she missed the demon and wanted it back desperately. Her trip back to the school was going to happen no matter what but getting picked up by Rose's parents was something Joan/Kat didn't expect or plan. Maybe that laugh in the bathroom stall after she realized Bill & his wife were Rose's parents was because she thought her encountering them was a special gift from the demon? I think she murdered them and took their heads off as an offering...a gift to the demon. Upon arriving at the school with their severed heads and going to the furnace room once again where she had been shot by the police officer, she hoped to be reunited with the demon who she had asked not to go when the priest was performing the exorcism. The demon was no longer there and no longer possessing her, it was gone...the priest's exorcism worked and the demon was gone forever. I believe her reaction in that last scene was the realization that the demon was in fact gone for good and that realization was devastating for Joan/Kat. Great movie...watch it!

Are our collective fears changing? Evolving? In the 90s, Scream—with its self-awareness and meta-humor—gave a much-needed rebirth to the slasher genre, and a craze of twisty teen films with high body counts followed. In the 2000s, Saw bet all its chips on hyper- violence, and the term "torture porn" was thrust upon our culture. Now, we are witnessing perhaps the most substantial change to the horror formula to date and the rise of a new sub-genre. These modern films focus far less on gratuitous violence and concern themselves more with a journey that leads us to tragic ends. This new crop of horror is more cerebral, less conventional—films which have been called "art house horror"—even "post-horror."At the forefront of this movement is award-winning production studio A24, which released such films as The Witch and It Comes at Night. Unfortunately overlooked in this pack is The Blackcoat's Daughter, written and directed by Osgood Perkins (son of Psycho's Anthony Perkins). Fantastically executed in almost every regard, The Blackcoat's Daughter is a supremely suspenseful gem.Despite being Perkins's directorial debut, the mood setting, storytelling, and performances he compels from his cast are masterful. Set primarily over winter break at a girls' boarding school, Perkins and cinematographer Julie Kirkwood paint a gorgeous, abandoned world of ice and snow and shadows. Each scene is beautifully framed, most are dimly and fluorescently lit. Darkness looms over every brick. The atmosphere of the film is unsettling from its very first frame.Further enhancing that tone is the film's score by Elvis Perkins (Osgood's brother). The reliance on strings and discordant, frantic melodies breathes terror. It's a unique and unsettling score—one of the best of the modern horror era.What hooked me, however, was the expert storytelling; the film excels at building and unraveling mystery. The rise in action is admittedly slow—not to be confused with boring. Menace lurks behind every corner, and often in plain sight. The film's tension and uncertainty are addictive drugs. There's a compelling drip of detail following two young, worried women stuck in an otherwise empty dormitory and a third who hitches a ride with a kind stranger. The film's unfurling of its mysteries and merging of its story arcs is beautiful and not without significant and satisfying surprises. Perkins's skills as a storyteller keeps us in our seats, fully captivated, and needing to see how this all plays out. And The Blackcoat's Daughter's third act does not disappoint. Its conclusion is intense, brutal—the kind of payout horror fans should expect.The acting, across the board, is fantastic. Scream queen Emma Roberts, Dexter's James Remar, and relative newcomer Lucy Boynton each deliver convincing performances as their troubled, broken characters. But for all the great acting found in the picture, the real highlight is Mad Men's Kiernan Shipka in the lead. Her nuanced yet intense performance as shy Kat is something to behold: off- center, menacing. Perhaps no one else could make the line, "You smell pretty," give one such intense shudders. Shipka's efforts here should be considered among the all- time great performances of the genre.Like A24's more commercially successful The Witch, The Blackcoat's Daughter is artistic horror of the highest quality: a haunting film that is equal parts beautiful and brutal. The mesmerizing film builds and builds towards a satisfying and sinister conclusion that will likely lead to more than one sleepless night.