There are vast amounts of blood in Jennifer Reeder’s Perpetrator, a high-school horror yarn that both celebrates and deconstructs pulpy genre tropes. Apart from dealing with blood-filled birthday cakes, gushing menstrual fountains and constant nosebleeds, the heroine also keeps plunging through gloopy red puddles into a vast underground bloodbath. What does it all mean? Hard to say, but this refreshingly bizarre queering of slasher conventions adds up to an ambitious, darkly comic, visually arresting curio. Following its world premiere in Berlin this week, Reeder’s mind-bending journey through the looking glass is heading to AMC’s horror streaming service Shudder, her second feature for the platform after Night’s End (2022).
Reeder has called Perpetrator her most straight-ahead genre project to date after previous “genre-adjacent” work like Knives and Skin (2019), which also premiered at the Berlinale to positive reviews. The Chicago-based director, screenwriter and visual artist certainly plays with the grammar of horror – masked stalkers, vulnerable young female victims, hints of vampiric bloodlust and supernatural powers. But anyone expecting jump scares, final girls and gory excess may leave befuddled. Reeder mostly subverts and interrogates these familiar plot mechanics, upturning gendered cliches by centring kick-ass female characters with their own agency, often queer women of colour fighting back against the male gaze and ritualised predator/prey roles.
Perpetrator shares some cast and crew with Knives and Skin, and deals with similar key themes, notably how patriarchal society normalises the notion of women living under constant threat from voilent, misogynistic men. Luminous rising star Kiah McKirnan (The Mare of Easttown) stars as Jonny, a high-school misfit who lives with her sickly single dad in a nondescript Midwestern town. While dad struggles with mysterious shape-shifting seizures, Jonny is sent away to stay with her eccentric aunt Hildie (Alicia Silverstone) just ahead of her 18th birthday. In reality, Hildie has been tasked with initiating the girl into a long-standing family tradition of “profound spectral empathy”, which can lead to identity-blurring episodes and overwhelming emotional overload. And nosebleeds. A lot of nosebleeds.
At her new school, Jonny encounters all manner of creeps and clowns, including the comically unhinged Principal Burke (Christopher Lowell) who delights in torturing his students with role-playing drills for a potential school shooter massacre. Meanwhile, a sinister masked man is kidnapping female students, specifically targeting girls who have dated Kirk (Sasha Kuznetsov), son of the local police chief. But rather than settle for living in constant fear, Jonny resolves to use her new-found powers to rescue the missing teens and bring the perpetrator to justice, uncovering some shock family secrets along the way.
Confused? You probably will be. Reeder’s highly stylised films have never been too concerned with realistic plotting or lucid character development. There is a lot to unpack here, but Perpetrator is a bumpy ride, making wild tonal lurches between sweet coming-of-age drama, bloody feminist revenge thriller, knowingly kitschy retro-spoof and surrealist nightmare. With its cast full of young and often unschooled performers, the film’s lo-fi indie aesthetic sometimes has a clunky, amateurish feel.
That said, the casting of Silverstone is an inspired choice, a pleasingly self-referential nod to her own career-making breakthrough role in Amy Heckerling’s high-school comedy Clueless (1995). Playing older than her 46 years, this former screen teen queen is one of the film’s gothic delights, relishing the chance to freight every line with cryptic portent and campy menace. She also acts the rest of the cast off screen in most of her scenes.
With recurring use of kaleidoscopic “bug eye” lens effects, the hallucinatory visuals and lurid avant-noir mood of Perpetrator are clearly indebted to David Lynch, just as Knives and Skin was. Both films even feature brazen musical homages to the late Angelo Badalamenti in their brooding, rumbling scores by Nick Zinner, guitarist with New York art-rockers Yeah Yeah Yeahs. There are throbbing, icky echoes of David Cronenberg’s body horror in the film’s visual mix too. Which is fine. Reeder already has a strong cinematic voice of her own. But if you are going to steal, steal from the best.
Director, screenwriter: Jennifer Reeder
Cast: Kiah McKirnan, Alicia Silverstone, Christopher Lowell, Melanie Liburd, Ireon Roach
Cinematography: Sevdije Kastrati
Editing: Justin Krohn
Production designer: Adri Siriwatt
Costume designer: Kate Grube
Music: Nick Zinner
Producers: Derek Bishé, Gregory Chambet
Production companies: Divide/Conquer (US), WTFilms (France)
World sales: WTFilms
Venue: Berlin International Film Festival (Panorama)
In English
100 minutes
