New Year's Countdown...of Horror: 3 - The Blackcoat's Daughter

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The Blackcoat's Daugher
2015, d. Osgood Perkins - amazonprime

The Story:

Kat and Rose are at a catholic boarding school together.  When their parents don't pick them up for the break in February, they're stuck together.  Kat has weird visions.  Rose thinks she might be pregnant. 

Meanwhile outside of town, Joan needs a ride and gets picked up by James Remar and his wife. Turns out their daughter died a few years earlier.  They're traumatized, but are they dangerous?  And what's the connection?

Why This?
Because The VVitch was unavailable, and I have these two kind of paired in my mind for some reason.

The Good:
It's effectively moody and atmospheric.  The leads (Kiernan Shipka, Lucy Boynton, Emma Roberts) are all really good.  Shot outside Ottawa?

Not so good:
This movie...it's not so good. This film starts to think itself clever, but it's not hard to catch onto the oh so obvious clues that Shipka and Roberts are (somehow) playing the same character in two different time periods.

The demonic possession doesn't seem well thought out, and I guess in general since I don't believe in that stuff I find it hard to invest in possession stories. 

It also takes almost an hour for the possession to really manifest itself. I liked the moodiness to that point but it just falls off the fucking wagon for the last 40 minutes.

This movie annoyed me.

James Remar, seriously starting to think this guy's not such a good actor.

The Bad Thing:
Some demon of some sort.  It's not specific and has no personality.  And are we to believe that Kat, years later, is trying to get the demon back in her? Or that it never left?  I dunno.  Don't really care either.

Franchise Potential?
Nope.  At least I hope not.

Did I Like Watching This?
To a point I was into it, but when I started to connect the threads, based off the too obvious clues it was dropping, I started getting very very annoyed. In the end, no, I really disliked this movie for it's attempt to be clever and manipulative (I would have been annoyed whether they succeeded or failed in their manipulation).

[Toasty's take - we disagree]