Perpetrator (Jennifer Reeder, 2023) (Patreon)

Jennifer Reeder's new film Perpetrator is getting very strong reviews since premiering at the Berlinale, and to be honest it took me a while to figure out exactly why. Granted, I am not the world's biggest horror aficionado, but Reeder's film initially struck me as clumsy and scattershot, a collection of half-formed ideas held together with a low-budget 1990s direct-to-video ambiance. Other than the presence of Alicia Silverstone liberally chewing scenery in a key supporting role, what were folks seeing in Perpetrator that I did not?

But then it hit me. Context is everything, and I suspect that for horror fans as well as movie lovers more generally, Perpetrator is an unapologetic gorefest in a genre that has become increasingly airless and antiseptic. In other words, Reeder and her badass mutant girl gang have arrived to liberate us from the tyranny of elevated horror.

In fact, the opening moments of Perpetrator are almost like a studiously downmarket remake of Bones and All, that lugubrious gewgaw from the perversely overrated Luca Guadagnino. Here, we meet 17-year-old Jonny (Kiah McKirnan) just before her father sends her away to live with great-aunt Hildie (Silverstone) because the girl is undergoing "changes" and he doesn't think he can handle her anymore. Jonnie immediately clashes with Hildie, who comes off like an aging debutante holding court over a dank mansion whose glory days are behind it. But it's Hildie, of course, who assists Jonnie in accepting her post-human birthright.

This alone would be plenty on Perpetrator's plate, but Reeder is working with serial killer tropes as well. The private school where Jonnie has just enrolled has a problem with young girls going missing, and although it's recognized as a problem -- much of the girls' curriculum centers on weird, ineffectual self-defense maneuvers -- it is not really regarded as a crisis. As Jonnie remarks, "girls go missing every day." And Perpetrator exists in a world ever so slightly more misogynist than our own, where the dismemberment of girls is little more than an inconvenience.

Despite clearly having a lot on its mind, Perpetrator is an unspectacular specimen, formally speaking. The lighting is flat, the gore is cheap-looking and plentiful, and the faux John Carpenter soundtrack will conjure memories of other films that are both better and worse than this one. Some of Reeder's key concepts seem to be lifted from recent films like The Fits or Lucile Hadžihalilović's hermetic mood pieces Innocence and Evolution. The puberty-as-monster-unleashed motif is a callback to Ginger Snaps. At one point, the masked killer directly quotes Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs. And virtually any slay-fest at a private girls' academy will be compared with Dario Argento.

Is Perpetrator derivative, or is it a postmodern text? Hard to say these days, but based on Reeder's other films, I suspect she's playing textual games with her viewers, calling on a wide array of genre sources to remind art-damaged snobs of ther g(l)ory of straight-ahead horror, all the various themes and stylistic approaches that have been assayed under that proud banner. From late night Cinemax cheapies to neo-Surrealism, the scary movie contains multitudes. The only constant is that, in all the good slasher films, women outwit the patriarchy and life to fight another day.