The Daughters of Virtue
2017 · 12m · USA
Directed by Michael Escobedo
Genres: drama, horror, thriller
Tones: dark, provocative, tense
A lonely housewife fears for her life when a women's prayer group meeting turns into a fanatical intervention to rid her soul of evil.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
The premise alone—weaponizing faith and feminine virtue against a woman trapped in her own home—is the kind of subversive inversion that makes consensus critics squirm, and Escobedo leans into the discomfort without apology or easy answers.
A formally controlled descent into psychological horror that recalls the paranoid-thriller lineage of Polanski and De Palma, using the domestic interior as both sanctuary and cage with deliberate compositional rigor.
The turning point lives in the shift from prayer to predation—a single moment where the group's tone changes registers, and the sound design (or lack thereof) makes clear this is no longer spiritual but predatory, a choice that recontextualizes everything before it.