A teenager who develops supernatural powers upon coming of age is a pretty common plot device in genre fiction, from vampire and werewolf stories to Marvel's mutants, but writer-director Jennifer Reeder puts a unique artistic spin on it in Perpetrator. The essential elements of the plot involve 18-year-old Jonny (Kiah McKirnan) discovering her newfound powers and using them to take down a villain who's been abducting, torturing, and murdering teenage girls in the town where she lives. Nothing about Perpetrator is that straightforward, though, and Reeder creates a dreamlike world in which superheroes and serial killers are defined by poetic, ineffable longing as much as by power and violence.
The mannered, arch tone of Perpetrator may be off-putting to genre fans at first, but Reeder drops the audience right into her surreal vision. The opening scene features a point-of-view shot from inside a killer's mask as the mysterious figure stalks a teenage girl in a pink coat who's walking alone on a street late at night. It could be the set-up for a slasher movie, as the masked man kidnaps the girl and holds her in some sort of warehouse, hooked up to medical equipment. The whole sequence is depicted in woozy, impressionistic visuals that focus on mood rather than suspense.
That continues throughout Perpetrator, even as Reeder places characters in imminent peril. Perpetrator introduces Jonny as she's breaking into a suburban house to steal jewelry, drugs, and a sparkly dress. She lives in what looks like a basement apartment with her distant father, Gene (Tim Hopper), who seems to suffer from some kind of medical condition. Jonny sells stolen goods to pay their rent, and she longs for a more normal life, mimicking a mundane conversation between herself and Gene about the mother she's never met.
There's clearly something wrong with Gene beyond mere illness, though, as his face appears to ripple and change when he looks in the mirror. He has an ominous phone conversation with a woman who warns him about Jonny: "She'll be 18 next week. You know what that means." Reeder isn't interested in spelling it out for the audience, though, and even when Gene sends Jonny away to live with her great-aunt, Hildie (Alicia Silverstone), characters continue to speak in cryptic pronouncements about what exactly is happening.
Finally, on Jonny's birthday, Hildie serves her a blood-filled cake and reveals that she's about to undergo something called "Forevering," developing what Hildie describes as "profound spectral empathy." In practice, Jonny's powers remain vague and ever-shifting, and Perpetrator doesn't bother to define its supernatural mythology. At Jonny's new school, the nurse tells her that she "has the eyes of someone much older" and that her heartbeat sounds like it may be two or three hearts, but that's as close as Perpetrator gets to an understanding of how Jonny's powers work.
Reeder focuses more on the campy allegory for patriarchy at a school run by the cheerily menacing Principal Burke (GLOW's Christopher Lowell). Burke teaches the female students self-defense by yelling at them about the horrific danger and despair they will constantly face as women, and he conducts active shooter drills in which he himself plays the attacker, shooting students with a squirt gun filled with fake blood. Even without its horror elements, Perpetrator succeeds as an absurdist satire, and Lowell makes Burke equally scary and laughable.
Silverstone approaches her role with similar enthusiasm, making Hildie into a glorious, imperious matriarch, with the implication that she may have been alive for hundreds of years. Silverstone delivers Reeder's stylized dialogue with panache, in the kind of showy part that she rarely gets to play at this point in her career. She's so mesmerizing that she occasionally overshadows McKirnan and the other young actors, who play the teenage characters with slightly more grounded emotion.
Jonny is confused but also empowered by the development of her abilities, going from an outcast weirdo to an ally for the popular girls, who are terrified of being the next to go missing. It's not difficult to figure out who's responsible for the kidnappings, but Perpetrator doesn't hinge on shocking twists or intricate plotting. Reeder is all about delivering a vibe, and Perpetrator evokes the heightened tone of high school dark comedies like Heathers and Jawbreaker. In its exaggerated, highly sexualized setting, Perpetrator could be the horror counterpart to the recent queer teen comedy Bottoms.
Perpetrator's sense of humor is darker and more deadpan. Not everything about it works. The climax, which culminates in a series of somewhat clumsy reveals, is a little underwhelming, and some supporting characters seem initially important only to be discarded. Reeder's ambitious vision could be served by a more coherent story, but Perpetrator creates an effective mood of existential dread and teenage rebellion.
Perpetrator opens Friday, September 1, in select theaters and streaming on Shudder.