School is Hell: 'The Blackcoat's Daughter'

Following up my last post, I decided to tackle the other film by Osgood Perkins, a former actor, and son of movie star Anthony Perkins.

His most recent film, 2016's I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House shares many traits with his first feature, 2015's The Blackcoat's Daughter - the beautiful cinematography, brilliant use of silence, impeccable design and lighting, and a constant sense of dread. Pretty Thing has a calmer, ghostlier vibe, while Blackcoat's Daughter follows a blunt, cold feeling of possession.

Both films relish the idea of physical isolation and loneliness of environment; in Pretty Thing, it's an old haunted farmhouse, in this film, it's an abandoned boarding school.

Kieran Shipka (the wonderfully dry pre-teen Sally Draper on Mad Men) is Katherine, a boarding school student who is waiting to be picked up by her parents at the beginning of a winter break. Weird dreams wake up Katherine (or is it a waking dream) featuring a shadowy figure she calls "Daddy" (Her father? A demon?) that starts her on a path that involves Rose, a fellow student who also needs to stay an extra day or so at school waiting for her parents as well. Let's just say, she'll regret that decision.

I don't want to discuss plot points too much (even the trailer shows too much). There is a second storyline that involves Emma Roberts. After seeing the entire movie, I think that storyline may not have been needed. I won't spoil it, but I think when you reach the end of the film you could ask yourself the same question.

I wondered if more time spent at the beginning of the film exploring Katherine's odd transformation might have made a more successful story. Things happen very quickly at the beginning, and the idea of possession begins right away; it seems rushed.

But you can't deny the fantastic vibe and the mood that Perkins created in the two feature films he's completed to date. I hope he can stick with these smaller, indie films that pack punches. He might get spoiled if he gets a big budget, movie stars, and major studio distribution. Or he could assemble a modern-day The Exorcist and become a true horror master filmmaker.

Silence: 'I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House'

Isn't silence scarier than noise? Especially when you're in a big house alone, or almost alone.

Osgood Perkins, son of famous actor Anthony Psycho Perkins, makes his directorial debut with I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, a slow-burning gothic ghost/haunted house story. Moving to the other end of the spectrum from the screeching, jump-cuts of movies like The Conjuring or Insidious, Pretty Thing is a quiet, delicate thing of beauty. Modern American audiences would no doubt find it 'boring' and 'slow' but the slower and quieter it got, the more it unnerved me.

The simple set up is that Lily (Ruth Wilson, like an older, timid Emma Stone) is a live-in nurse who moves into the large isolated home of an elderly author (Paula Prentiss) known for her mystery/thriller novels. Lily is nervous and lonely and soon to be enthralled with uncovering why her almost catatonic patient keeps referring to her as 'Polly' and why she keeps hearing voices and thumping noises in the house.

The imagery and set design in the film is impeccable. The interiors and natural lighting are clean and crisp (sunny entryways, white-washed wood) or faded and decaying (molding walls, grimy wallpaper) depending on location of the characters and time of day. The CGI is kept to a minimum and beautifully evocative (see the above ghostly trailed image). Faded, foggy, muted, shadowy; these adjectives describe the film well.

I see references to Kubrick and Polanski, on a shoestring budget, and flashes of films like The Tenant, The Changeling, The Shining, The House of the Devil, but much more sedated. Discoveries of turned over rugs, bubbling paint on walls, growing black mold, upside down chairs are all the more effective when the horror seems mundane and not doled out in jump scares. It's like the anti-Crimson Peak.

The one edit I would make is to strip back some of the voice over narration. The intro/outro are nice, but there seems to be a bit too much throughout. Really capitalizing on those long stretches of silence that do exist in the film are what drew me in to this ghostly vibe wholeheartedly.