The Blackcoat's Daughter (2017)
Directed by Osgood Perkins
Two young women at a prestigious prep school are assailed by an evil, invisible power when they're stranded over winter break.
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The rogue’s gallery includes: Rachett’s shifty assistant Hector MacQueen (Josh Gad, Marshall); Rachett’s dutiful butler Edward Masterman (Derek Jacobi); a lustful widow, Caroline Hubbard (Michelle Pfeiffer, Mother); the moralist missionary Pilar Estravados (Penélope Cruz); a fascist Austrian professor Gerhard Hardman (Willem Dafoe); renowned ballet dancers and spouses Countess Andrenyi (Lucy Boynton, The Blackcoat’s Daughter) and Count Andrenyi (Sergei Polunin).
The suspect list is a long one: we’ve got a governess (Daisy Ridley), a count (Sergei Polunin), a countess (Lucy Boynton, The Blackcoat’s Daughter ), a widow (Michelle Pfeiffer), a professor (Willem Dafoe), a missionary (Penélope Cruz), an assistant (Josh Gad), a princess (Judi Dench), a doctor (Leslie Odom Jr.) a butler (Derek Jacobi), a salesman (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) and a maid (Olivia Colman, Hot Fuzz ).
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The nature of evil, and how folks can become complicit in their own destruction and self-made damnations, is a recurring theme in Longlegs and other works by Perkins, including his feature directorial debut, The Blackcoat's Daughter.
As genre-based studios, such as horror factory Blumhouse, seemingly double down on exhuming the decrepit corpses of beloved classics for their corporate IP, it’s a breath of fresh air to see a film that manages to build hype entirely on its own merit. The months-long build-up to Longlegs, the latest directorial effort from writer-director Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter, Gretel & Hansel), has been a savvy bit of marketing on the part of distributor, Neon.
Perkins, a son of the legendary actor Anthony Perkins (best known for playing Norman Bates in Psycho), has made a chain of interesting small-budget efforts over the past decade, including the boarding-school thriller The Blackcoat’s Daughter and the fantasy film Gretel & Hansel.
Longlegs (in theaters Friday) was written and directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House) who has positioned himself at the tip of the spear of “vibes cinema.”
And yes, being a child of such a particular kind of actor has undoubtedly influenced Perkins’ overall “spooky” bent in terms of generally opting to make creepy films (some of his previous ones include The Blackcoat’s Daughter, The Girl in the Photographs, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House and, more commercially, Gretel & Hansel).