For me, this movie was definitely about a fragile-minded girl feeling desperately alone... and taking to the extremes, what she was willing to do in order to not feel like that anymore. Loneliness and fear can posses us, just like demons. They can drive us crazy. This horror movie is a slow-burner and definitely not for everyone. The idea behind it is very good and well played upon... I'm just not really sure that it needs the gory parts to be this explicit. It felt a lot like gratuitous gore. Or maybe it just seemed much too real and grotesque... more like real-life murders, than a movie. So what would You be willing to do, in order to not feel alone alone anymore? Whose company would yo accept... and, if the connection were lost, what would you be willing to do in order to reconnect?

Virtually no storyline, plenty of overlong "art" shots and obvious rips from actual horror flicks - all are predictable products of a writer who is also the director. In this scenario, nobody is available to challenge whether the artiste's vision is coherent, let alone interesting or entertaining. Tripe results.

In this brooding psychological horror film, two female students become stranded at their prep school over the winter, one abandoned by her parents, the other by deceiving hers. A second story thread told simultaneously, has another girl, a hospital escapee, head towards the school, accepting a lift from a middle aged couple who are grieving the anniversary of their daughter's death.Set in the middle of winter, this one has a chilly atmosphere from the get-go and I found it to be a very good example of a modern horror movie. It is not afraid to hold things back from the viewer and instead reveal its details as it goes on; this sense of mystery accentuates the suspense and feeling of dread that permeates events. The two plot strands do eventually dovetail together and the puzzle is finally revealed. Although I think it would be fair to say that there is an element of audience manipulation here once you understand the twist, given the different actresses used but I am willing to forgive this as the movie earned a certain amount of slack on account of delivering such an effectively creepy and unpredictable narrative. Audience cheating aside, this is a film which feels like it demands a re-watch to me. Its enigmatic qualities and off-kilter ambiance ensured that it had a very good atmosphere throughout, helped considerably by the impressive low ominous soundtrack used throughout. The acting is very good too, with Kiernan Shipka especially impressive as the girl who begins the piece very timid and then becomes very scary later on. The horror is a mixture of visceral moments with atmosphere-driven oddness, such as strange conversations in the dead of night, a shadowy demon and uncanny rituals in a furnace room. It all adds up to a very impressive feature which offers us some genuine intrigue, well delivered sinister scenes and a fragmented story we are allowed to piece together ourselves. This is definitely something of an under-rated gem I would say.

"The Blackcoat's Daughter" (US title, the better one in my opinion) or "February" (UK title) is a Canadian 90-minute movie from 2015, in the English language of course, so still a relatively new movie that soon gets a DVD release here in Germany I think. The director and writer is Oz Perkins, son of Anthony Perkins, and this is his first directorial effort as he was a prolific actor until now mostly. With Remar, Holly, Roberts and Shipka, he got a pretty decent cast together, the 3 ladies are for example very famous for their small screen acting (Mad Men, NCIS, American Horror Story). But back to this one here. The film includes two core story lines who seem to have basically no connection almost and also seem to take place during very different times, there is a huge gap between these, so it is not a chronological story at all. The one thing I want to say here is that I am a huge Kiernan Shipka fan and everybody who has seen her on Mad Men will have a hard time making a case against her being the most talented actress under 20 right now that Moretz and Steinfeld have passed that mark. And she also did not let me down here. Luckily, the longer the film goes the more she moves into the center of it all and definitely elevates the material on several occasions. There is one phone scene in particular where she really shines with her face expressions. I think she really combines dedication and vulnerability so well that I am positive we will see a lot of greatness from her in the coming years, probably decades.The rest of the cast was okay too. The acting really wasn't the problem here and I even liked Emma Roberts and I am usually not too big on her. The problem is the execution though. It is all quantity over quality. Almost every scene is supposed to be scary and creepy and it quickly becomes annoying. There is zero build-up and as a consequence also almost zero good moments. The few jump scares did not really add anything either. I am sure Perkins sees a lot more in this film than audiences do. But he just did not get his vision through, mostly with his writing, but also with the direction. In my viewing, I even heard people laughing at how bad it was at times and that's the only explanation as there are 0% comedy in here unless you c(o)unt the unexpected and random inclusions of the c-word. The exorcism scene near the end is the best example. It is a really crucial moment, but it feels rushed in for the sake of it as Perkins is puzzling together snippets that have worked in horror films over the last years, decades even, but it's never more than snippets. They are not really fitting together. The music, score, soundtrack (call it whatever you like) is not helping either as it added a great deal of negativity to the showy over-the-top way in which basically every scene should be memorable, but the opposite was achieved, namely that the memorable moments became forgettable. Not even the atmospheric take was successful with the (almost) empty school. Or the reference about the burned hair of the two women, which was there, but never picked up on again. It was truly shoddy to watch at times. There was such a good opportunity for a quality film here given the cast, but they definitely missed out on it and the outcome is a great example of how script is key and even strong actors cannot make a weak story work. I give these 1.5 hours a thumbs-down and suggest you watch something else instead.