the blackcoat's daughter: slow-burning doom

*SPOILER ALERT*

(2017. dir: Osgood Perkins) Two girls, abandoned by their parents over the school holiday, are left largely unattended in a snowed-in boarding school. The atmosphere, made of ambient sound and ominous, underplayed music, the institutional ugliness of a Catholic girls' school, the loudness of an empty place which is usually overcrowded with life, and a keen instinct for the unsettling image on a par with Kiyoshi Kurosawa's, makes this an exercise in psychic oppression that's hard to shake off. It might work as a metaphor for the America who voted for Our Vainglorious Dickwad, in fact. A weak person, feeling abandoned and unvalued, invites a devil in, finally finding purpose and a recourse for her stemmed-up tide of withheld strength in a terrible freedom. There's a stunning moment following the exorcism in which she watches the devil across the room and says plaintively, "Don't go." It's like the bullies who feel permission now, flowing down from the bully-culture of a White House and guided by the example of a Russian dictator, to emerge from the cocoon of civilization and bring the violence to whatever victims happen into their paths. To the undisciplined mind, even evil purpose feels better than none at all.

It's what they call a "slow burner", which I find to be its most impressive aspect, in the end. Long, hushed passages in which the girls' inner lives are quietly active and complex, brilliantly photographed by DP Julie Kirkwood for odd angles and discomfort. A subplot with really good turns by James Remar and Lauren Holly, neither of whom I recognized, seems at first at odds with the main story but, in the end, it turns out it's just very bold editing, very bold storytelling, all culminating in that bleak light of day which arrives after the monster has abandoned one to one's previous emptiness.

It gave me nightmares. It gave me an awful feeling before I slept that something unholy might come uninvited up the stairs, or, worse, something I'd invited by watching the film. It's the kind of thing that's so oppressive it feels like your life is a little changed, a little worse, and maybe a little bit doomed, once its images are in your head.