'Perpetrator' Review: Chaos Reigns

The film is almost impatient about teasing out any depth of feeling from its scenarios.

Writer-director Jennifer Reeder’s Perpetrator cycles through characters and settings at a considerable clip, never stopping long enough to flesh them out beyond an outline. First, in a pre-credits teaser, a masked serial killer abducts a girl walking alone at night. The film then cuts to protagonist Jonny (Kiah McKirnan) breaking into a house before fencing the stolen goods for rent money that she gives to her ailing father (Tim Hopper).

Across this opening stretch of the film, the audience watches Jonny in this setting just long enough to sense her ennui—that she’s desperate to flee her dead-end life. Soon enough, she’s on a train and getting out of Dodge, on her way to live with her aunt Hildie (Alicia Silverstone). And it’s then that she starts to develop strange abilities that directly channel the feelings of the people around her—as well as those of the ones who’ve gone missing.

These threads more or less come together by the end of Perpetrator but not in a way that feels especially purposeful. While creating the backdrop for Jonny’s journey, Reeder struggles to linger on the meaningful details of her story, which feels spread thin by its broad range of thematic concerns. It’s perhaps the closest the film inadvertently comes to encapsulating the teenage experience: that of rapidly and absently swiping through a phone.

The film is almost impatient about teasing out any depth of feeling from its scenarios, from Jonny’s parental issues to a romance with another girl that mostly develops off screen. Even her super-empathetic powers, so apparently central to the film, receive the same scattershot treatment. They’re the main reason that she moved in with her aunt, who knows a thing or two about what afflicts Jonny, though the abilities only tenuously fit into the overarching narrative. Worse, Reeder struggles to visualize them, with the film leaning on Jonny explaining what’s meant to have occurred, and one scene where she walks through a party while adopting the body language of different partygoers is so visually murky that it’s difficult to tell what’s happening.

These moments don’t stand out in the context of a film that tried very, very hard to be strange in other areas as well: Aunt Hildie forces Jonny to eat lipstick and fills a cake with blood; girls perform cheers while wearing masks patterned after old women; and Jonny’s new high school principal (Christopher Lowell) participates a bit too enthusiastically in school shooting drills. But perhaps the most damning detail by far is that none of these oddities are half as disorienting as Perpetrator’s tenuous grip on basic storytelling structure.

Steven Nguyen Scaife is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Buzzfeed News, Fanbyte, Polygon, The Awl, Rock Paper Shotgun, EGM, and others. He is reluctantly based in the Midwest.

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