A24 gave us two of 2016’s best horror movies: The Witch and Green Room (four, if you count the combined egos of the Gallagher brothers in Oasis: Supersonic and the turkey in Krisha as monsters). The studio hopes to have an equally successful 2017, beginning with The Blackcoat’s Daughter. The film follows two students, Kat (Mad Men‘s Kiernan Shipka) and Rose (Sing Street breakout Lucy Boynton), who deal with strange and possibly evil occurrences when their parents fail to pick them up from boarding school during winter break. There’s also Joan (American Horror Story‘s Emma Roberts), who, for reasons unknown, is trying to get to the school as quickly as possible.
The Blackcoat’s Daughter, which was originally titled February, premiered at the 2015 Toronto Film Festival, where it received generally strong reviews (Bloody Disgusting called it a “brooding horror masterpiece”). But director Oz Perkins said it ran “into a few little snags here and there with distribution.” The issues have finally been resolved, and A24 is releasing the film through DirecTV Cinema on February 16 and in limited theaters on March 31.
Here’s the official synopsis:
A deeply atmospheric and terrifying new horror film, The Blackcoat’s Daughter centers on Kat (Kiernan Shipka) and Rose (Lucy Boynton), two girls who are left alone at their prep school Bramford over winter break when their parents mysteriously fail to pick them up. While the girls experience increasingly strange and creepy occurrences at the isolated school, we cross cut to another story—that of Joan (Emma Roberts), a troubled young woman on the road, who, for unknown reasons, is determined to get to Bramford as fast as she can. As Joan gets closer to the school, Kat becomes plagued by progressively intense and horrifying visions, with Rose doing her best to help her new friend as she slips further and further into the grasp of an unseen evil force. The movie suspensfully builds to the moment when the two stories will finally intersect, setting the stage for a shocking and unforgettable climax.
