February aka The Blackcoat’s Daughter

Kat (Kiernan Shipka) and Rose (Lucy Boynton) are in different grades at a prestigious prep school for girls, where they are stranded after their parents mysteriously fail to retrieve them for winter break. Meanwhile, a haunted young woman, Joan (Emma Roberts), makes a bloody pilgrimage across a frozen landscape toward the school. As Joan gets closer, Kat is plagued by increasingly terrifying visions, and Rose can only look on in horror as her younger schoolmate becomes possessed by an unseen evil force. What at first seems to be a coming-of-age story about two girls at different stages of maturation, turns out to be an exploration of shocking and profound loss. The film has a deeply humanistic thread and treats its fragile protagonists with tenderness even as it unleashes terror. A sophisticated kind of scary, FEBRUARY will get at audiences' rawest emotions—evoking childhood dread and the ways in which our earliest encounters with loss can crack us open and leave us vulnerable to darkness. –Toronto International Film Festival