February/The Blackcoat's Daughter

Half Term

February/
The Blackcoat's Daughter
Canada 2015
Directed by Oz Perkins
A24 Films

Okay, so February (aka The Blackcoat’s Daughter) is going to be a tricky film to talk about because there’s something about the movie which will dawn on a fair percentage of the audience maybe 20 minutes into the movie, when a third character is introduced... but I’m still going to try and shuffle around this element and attempt to not reveal anything, even though, as I implied, many people will reach a conclusion about a certain aspect of the movie fairly early on. 

Okay, so the basic set up is we have three girls who the narrative follows. The film is set in February, in what must be half term week. Two thirds of the action of the film takes place in a remote, snow surrounded, boarding school where two girls in their late teens, Katherine and Rose played by Kiernan Shipka and Lucy Boynton are left behind, when all the other girls are picked up by their parents for the holiday. So they have to stay there for a day or two with two, un-costumed nuns who work there while they are waiting for their parents to show up. However, something is happening in the school and there are rumours of satanic worship. Meanwhile, the third woman, Joan, played by Emma Roberts, has escaped from somewhere but a kindly gentleman and his wife pick her up and offer to drive her to where she’s going. 

And that’s really all I’m going to say about the plot because... well, because it’s actually a very simple story but the way the story is structured is fragmented and elliptical. This does two things... one, it makes the story more interesting to discover, simple as it is and two, it stops a certain trick of the story being detected by the audience until... well like I said... twenty minutes or so into it. 

The film is written and directed by Oz Perkins, who is the son of actor Anthony Perkins (who has recently, since I saw this and wrote this review, become quite a succesful presence in the modern cinematic landscape). And, it turns out he’s not a bad director. I don’t know if I’d go as far as calling this a horror film because I think a certain element of the plot depends on your point of view. I think it’s similar to Saint Maud (reviewed here) in terms of how the audience perceives or believes certain things, which will affect how you categorise this as either a horror or a thriller. But it does, at least, tend to use some of the tension of the horror film and it does get quite gory towards the end. Certainly, the director knows how to squeeze a large amount of dread from what was probably a small budget, delivering a film which manages to maintain a fairly creepy atmosphere, even in the parts of the movie which are unscored... there’s a scene where Katherine is gazing out of a window with no music but with a smile playing on her face which, once you’ve seen the movie, I think will be something you would remember. 

To accomplish this kind of atmosphere, the director mostly eschews camera movement, I noticed. Sure there’s a little but not much and he seems content to just place the camera in a static position for the most part and let the scenes play out just cutting from one point of view to another. It slows the pacing of the film considerably but, that’s okay, it’s what gives it the edge it has and I have to say it works very well when, really, the story perhaps doesn’t feel like it could hold up if the movie were sped up and, more pertinently, edited in a different manner to the way it’s presented here. 

Although it could be dismissed as a simplistic variant of an exorcist story... and I’d maybe have a hard time defending even that... the way in which the film is structured helps relieve the inherent malaise that many modern movies dipping their toes into that kind of territory seem to generate and, even though this is the director’s first feature, I’d have to say he really knows what he’s doing here.

Another element of the film, the sparsely spotted score by another member of the show business family, Elvis Perkins, is extremely effective when it is called upon to contribute, maintain or even generate the quite palpable tension inherent in a simple scene... like a girl walking slowly down a corridor. Also, the odd non-sequitur images such as one of a shadowy figure in a basement energetically pursuing some kind of ritual are pretty effective and are one of the things which help build the atmosphere where the audience, or at least me, are on the edge of their seat. 

And, for fear of accidentally including spoilers, that’s as much as I’ll say about February/The Blackcoat’s Daughter. Whether it’s a horror film or not is for you to decide but I think it would play well to those of you who enjoy the horror genre. The central element on which a certain part of the movie hinges on was perhaps less effective on me because of the way I clumsily perceive certain things but, yeah, I’d be curious to see what people think of the plot on this one, so I’ll recommend it to a couple of friends and see if they had a common experience. Either way, a well directed movie which is very much worth a look if you’re into movies which build a strong, slow burn atmosphere. Give it a go. 

MaXXXine

XXX Factor

MaXXXine
Directed by Ti West
USA/UK/New Zealand 2024
A24
UK cinema cut.

Warning: Slight spoilers.

MaXXXine is the third and presumably final part of Ti West and Mia Goth’s successful X Trilogy, which started with the incredible X, reviewed here (where Goth took on the role of both Maxine Minx and Pearl) and continued with the prequel, Pearl, reviewed here (where she just played the title character). Once again, Goth (also on board as a producer, although she’s not one of the credited writers this time around) plays the part of Maxine and this is set some years after X, during the 1980s, with Maxine Minx now a hugely successful porn star, looking to make the crossover to acting in real, Hollywood movies.

After some footage of Maxine as a kid, which is purely there to establish something during the third act denouement, we start this film once again with a big door being opened... but this time it’s not the barn door from Pearl’s farm but a similar looking door on a studio set in Hollywood, where we see Maxine auditioning for a role in a sequel to a low budget horror movie, The Puritan, to be directed by the same director of the first, Elizabeth Bender (played by Elizabeth Debicki). However, although she’s successful in getting the part and, hopefully, cracking Hollywood, it looks like her past, as the final girl survivor and self defence murderer from the events depicted in X, is also about to catch up with her, in the form of someone who certainly wants to grab her attention and who does so through murdering her friends and securing the services of sleazy, private detective John Labat, played by Kevin Bacon.

Yeah, that’s a thing here, by the way... while the first two films felt like independent movies (which they kind of were, in a way), MaXXXine feels like it has a lot of famous actors in it, not least of all the two, central cops portrayed by the always watchable Bobby Cannavale and the equally brilliant, as she always is, Michelle Monaghan. Honestly, as good as Mia Goth is here (and, she really is, as you’d expect), the two cops are the reals stars of the film as far as I’m concerned. They don’t get too much screen time but I would like to have seen more of their characters, it has to be said.

Anyway, the first main question that comes up is, does this all have something to do with the real life serial killer known as The Night Stalker who was terrorising Hollywoodland at the time... or is someone using those murders as cover for their own. Either way, Maxine needs to find out so she can concentrate on being the standout star of The Puritan 2... and she does so in her own, ruthless manner.

Now there’s a lot of good stuff here, not least of which is the use of sets and references from other films, such as the old Universal Bates Motel and house from Psycho. In fact, there’s a moment in the film where Kevin Bacon’s character has chased Maxine into the Bates house and, for a minute there, I thought we were going to get a blow by blow replay of Arbogast’s death scene in the original Psycho (as it happens, Kevin Bacon’s death, when it comes, is far nastier).

So, all the actors are fine, the direction, shot design and editing is... all good. That being said, I’d have to say that this is the least satisfying of the X Trilogy. It just doesn’t seem as clever, maybe wastes an opportunity about exploring the title character’s lineage (because I may have misunderstood the point of the dual role in the first movie, as it turns out) and, though I was kind of expecting it to have a double ending at one point, it didn’t do it in the way I was expecting it to and, while that’s normally a positive experience for me (I want a movie to surprise me), I kinda thought the ending we did get just felt a bit off and, well, a bit hum drum. It also felt like the dual ending could have been a ‘flip a coin’ decision, in terms of where it leaves the characters for the last sequence.

The other big sin the film commits is that it doesn’t really make good on the XXX factor in the title. X was about a bunch of people going to shoot a porn movie (and just hiring the wrong location) and the boldness of the nudity and positive sexuality represented throughout the film was a breath of fresh air for modern movie making. Pearl skipped a lot of that but made up for it by the way it was shot and the call backs to old movies (although, it kinda felt the technical  call backs were an anachronism to a later time than being represented in that one). This one has pretty much no sex and the nudity is poorly lit or just not on screen. And yes, I was disappointed by that missing element. If a film is called Star Wars, for example, I want to see people having battles among the stars. If it’s a title referencing a term for hardcore, pornographic films, as this one is, then I’d expect to see some of that better represented here... especially when the character of the main protagonist is a world famous porn star.

All said and done though, I still quite liked MaXXXine and, while it wasn’t the ending of the trilogy I’d hoped for... it at least, kinda wraps things up and so, I can forgive it if the hyperbole of the marketing machine is selling the product as something it’s not, to be honest. My least favourite of the series but I’m still hoping they release a nice, X Trilogy box set on Blu Ray at some point soon (I deliberately didn’t buy the first two because I’m assuming/hoping a box set will be released in the near future).