Dir. Oz Perkins | Now Streaming On: HBOMax | Rating: 3/5

I know Projectile Varmint is a fan of this one, or at least its creativity, in the way that it can dip into quite a few subgenres and themes. The Blackcoat’s Daughter delivers the kind of twisted and dark vibe I like from femme driven horror, but as the credits rolled, I found myself wanting more from its storytelling and horror. 

This film features a nonlinear timeline and unreliable narrators. As a viewer, this storytelling style is not my strong suit, since these kinds of storylines often go over my head. I probably caught the twist much later than the average viewer (some might say too late) and since I found myself confused in the last 30 minutes of the film, that may have dampened its delivery. 

My critique of the timeline skips in this story is that the actresses they chose look too close in age for me to genuinely believe a timeskip is happening. Though all three leads, Emma Roberts, Kiernan Shipka, and Lucy Boynton all deliver strong performances, the script is clunky in a few places. Notably, all of the lines delivered by Bill and Linda are so unnatural in both context and delivery, maybe because they’re supposed to sound cryptic?

For scares, we’ve got some slow burning dread and tasteful body horror. I was shocked at how closely this body horror echoed A24’s poster child Hereditary (2018). Was Ari Aster taking some notes from Oz Perkins? What I loved about these horror elements is that the film doesn’t dwell on them, you get a glimpse of them and then you decide what you make of them. But, there really isn’t enough horror for me here, which tends to be a sticking point for psychological horror. 

Visually, we had some wide shots of scenery and rooms that forced us to look at the background, often revealing the sinister things lurking just behind the focal point of the shot. The last shot of the film of Emma Roberts in the snowy landscape is particularly noteworthy, but overall, doesn’t swing as hard as some of the other A24 greats. This film is also entirely dismal when we look at this from a diversity perspective. This is basically an entire cast of white women with no justifiable reason why this needed to be the case. 

This wasn’t a complete miss, but I think there was so much untapped potential in this film. Oz Perkins definitely comes into his own in terms of storytelling execution in his later work, like Gretel & Hansel (2020). 

Know Before You Watch: death, blood, gore.