All year long I had heard people saying how good a film called The Blackcoat's Daughter was yet I could just not find this anywhere. Luckily I realised the film is actually called February everywhere outside of the U.S, not only that but it had been sat gathering dust on my Netflix list for quite some time.
February takes place out of sequence quite a lot of the time, yet despite this it isn't actually that hard a film to follow. During half term at an American Catholic boarding school two students are left behind due to their parents not turning up to collect them. Kat (Kiernan Shipka) is worried her parents died in an accident due to a nightmare she had, while Rose (Lucy Boynton from I Am the Pretty Thing That Live in the House) purposely gave hers the wrong date so that she would have time to tell her boyfriend she is pregnant. Kat's behaviour starts to become very strange with the usually meek girl acting out of character which concerns Rose. Meanwhile in a separate storyline Bill (James Remar from Dexter) offers stranger Joan (Emma Roberts from American Horror Story) a lift with him and his wife after seeing the girl waiting for a bus in the cold winter night.
I loved the way February was set out, it creates mini cliffhangers, and has little chapters that play with time. Sometimes it shows the same timeframe but with another character's perspective, sometimes it runs stories concurrently that don't take place together. An example is a phone rings and a character goes to answer it, then future events happen and it is only later on in the film it goes back to the phone call scene and shows it in full. It does this with various characters in a variety of ways. Stripped to its bare bones this is a film about demonic possession, whether that be actual, or down to mental illness, but it skirts away from a lot of the usual tropes (with the exception of one scene) and has that angle put on the back shelf with it insinuated by how characters have started acting.
