"Perpetrator" has all sorts of weirdness that doesn't pay off

Perpetrator (2023)

“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 all 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. Read the full review at GuyAtTheMovies

Grade: D +

Shudder released "Perpetrator" (100 min.) in select theaters, followed by a streaming release on Shudder on September 1, 2023.