The Blackcoat's Daughter (2017)
Directed by Osgood Perkins
No — The Blackcoat's Daughter is not woke, scoring 4 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
The Blackcoat's Daughter arrives with snow, a Catholic boarding school, and a boiler room that functions as a shrine to something unpleasant.
Consciousness Markers
The film centers on three young women and critics noted it 'resists girls-in-peril clichés,' but this is atmospheric horror craft rather than any deliberate feminist messaging.
The cast is entirely white, led by Emma Roberts, Kiernan Shipka, and Lucy Boynton, with no diverse or inclusive casting choices made.
There are no LGBTQ+ characters, themes, or subtext anywhere in the film.
Race is entirely absent as a theme or concern in this boarding-school possession story.
No environmental or climate themes are present; the winter setting is purely atmospheric.
The film contains no economic critique or anti-capitalist messaging whatsoever.
No body-positivity themes; the film's bodily content is horror-oriented (vomiting, contortion, decapitation).
Mental illness appears only as demonic possession and institutional horror, not as neurodivergent representation.
The film is a fictional supernatural horror with no historical subject matter to revise.
Perkins deliberately used horror as a 'Trojan Horse' for a sad story about loss; the film is moody and oblique rather than preachy or message-driven.
Why it received this score
The Blackcoat's Daughter arrives with snow, a Catholic boarding school, and a boiler room that functions as a shrine to something unpleasant. Osgood Perkins directs with patience and a straight face, letting three young women carry a possession story that is more about grief than doctrine. The film is austere, cold, and carefully withheld. It is also, from a classification standpoint, nearly empty of contemporary social messaging. The cast is uniformly white, and the narrative makes no room for questions of representation, sexuality, race, or economic grievance. Winter is weather here, not a climate sermon. The boiler is not a metaphor for late capitalism. It is a boiler.
The female-centered story has drawn note for resisting girls-in-peril clichés, and that is a real formal achievement. It is not a feminist argument. The film watches its young women with dread and sympathy, but it does not organize their suffering into a thesis about patriarchy. Similar caution applies to the mental institution and the exorcism. These are instruments of horror, not platforms for neurodivergent representation. The body count and the bodily fluids are genre mechanics, not body positivity. There is no historical subject to revise, no lecture to deliver, no lesson about the environment, and no sermon about money. Perkins has said he wanted to tell a sad story and used horror as a Trojan horse. The horse contains sadness, not a pamphlet.
The film leaves us with atmosphere, performance, and a demon who communicates by phone. Kiernan Shipka, Emma Roberts, and Lucy Boynton do the work without asking for approval. The film's cultural awareness is close to nil, and that is not a criticism of its quality. It is a description of its priorities. The Blackcoat's Daughter is a moody, oblique horror film about loss and the awful quiet that follows it. It does not scold, explain, or instruct. In this ledger, that leaves almost every column blank. The lone faint mark belongs to the film's female perspective, which is present but incidental. A sommelier would call this a clean vintage with no additives. We would call it a horror film that keeps its politics in the freezer.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
Two young women at a prestigious prep school are assailed by an evil, invisible power when they're stranded over winter break.
Questions about The Blackcoat's Daughter
Is The Blackcoat's Daughter woke?
No — The Blackcoat's Daughter is not woke, scoring 4 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does The Blackcoat's Daughter have any woke elements?
Very few. None of the 10 markers reaches 30, the level where a marker counts as present; the highest is Feminist Agenda at 10.
How does The Blackcoat's Daughter compare to other 2017 movies?
It ranks #252 of the 309 films from 2017 we've scored; their average is 19. The wokest is I Am Not Your Negro (92).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.