‘Perpetrator’ Movie Review: A Weirder But Jumbled and Empty “Sabrina the Teenage Witch”
Photo from Shudder
From Jeremy Kibler
Perpetrator is a bizarro jumble of tonal shifts, stylized motifs, and plot ideas but so frustratingly misguided that one just stops caring. Think if Gregg Araki made an experimental Sabrina the Teenage Witch, but this is actually the fourth film from auspicious writer-director Jennifer Reeder. For her first feature in 2019, Reeder blended auteur influences (John Waters and David Lynch) with her own singular voice for genre-defying, cult-in-the-making curio Knives and Skin. It was “Vibes: The Movie” but also audacious, oddly poignant, and ultimately unlike anything else. Perpetrator is cut from the same cloth but even more of a different animal — it’s rebellious in its weirdness but about as empty as a blood-drained cadaver.
The story involves Jonny (Kiah McKirnan), a troubled young woman who’s surviving as a kleptomaniac. She’s about to turn 18, so her deadbeat father (Tim Hopper) makes an arrangement: Jonny goes to stay with her tough great-aunt Hildie (Alicia Silverstone), while he tries pulling himself together (whether or not he ever does isn’t important). She begins at a new school, where girls going missing is not a rarity. Since 18 is a milestone, Jonny adopts a hereditary gift called “forevering” (or “possession in reverse”) that can hopefully guide her to find who’s been abducting and brutalizing her teenage classmates.
A supernatural gift, synchronized nosebleeds, lipstick-eating, body-part snatching, a long-lost mother, misogyny, and sisterhood make up Perpetrator, and yet not a lot of it connects in a way that’s meaningful, satisfying, or coherent. Everything is odd, almost all the time, and defiantly so. When the film does settle down to give us a quiet or revealing moment between characters, it goes right back to face-morphing, bleeding cakes, and anus-shaped holes in people’s chests. Please, just don’t ask.
Relative newcomer Kiah McKirnan (TV’s Mare of Easttown) is definitely someone to keep an eye on as Jonny. Jonny’s budding relationship with classmate and new friend Elektra (Ireon Roach) is one of the more interesting and sensitive sections of the film, until this entire thread gets dropped. Given her brief but memorable turns in The Killing of the Sacred Deer and The Lodge, Alicia Silverstone has proven her taste in fearless, unpredictable projects. With a dramatic look or a quick bite down of her teeth, Silverstone will go big, or in terms of an expository monologue, she finds hushed subtleties in the role of Hildie. It’s an arch, deliciously campy performance in a movie that could have used even more of her. Then there’s Chris Lowell (Promising Young Woman) as Principal Burke, who makes no attempt to hide his insanity as he’s also the shooter in his own school-shooting drills.
There’s a feminine, queer coming-of-age film right there, and a mother-daughter story that’s right there. Then there’s world-building involving a coven of sorts, and the mystery (such as it is) behind the serial perpetrator barely seems to matter. Put it all together like an anchovy-pineapple pizza and it’s just an indulgent, confounding mess that doesn’t hang together.
It’s not totally unclear what Reeder is going for on a thematic level, but all of her story threads and themes get lost in a fever dream of surreality and filmmaking choices that are either avant-garde or just amateurish. Daring visual flourishes and a focus on female voices aside, Perpetrator might be one person’s kind of weird, but what a big swing and a miss. It ultimately lives up its own ass in trying to be a wild cult film.
Rating: 1.5/5
Perpetrator is in select theaters now and will be available to stream on Shudder on September 1, 2023.
