‘Perpetrator’: Berlin Review

Dir. Jennifer Reeder. US/France. 2023. 100 mins. 

A generously over-seasoned witches’ brew, Perpetrator features a wild array of ingredients from the larder of the macabre – telepathy, shape-shifting, gore a go-go, surgical body horror… Jennifer Reeder’s film, featuring in Berlin’s Panorama sidebar, feels at once slap-happy and deliriously free-associative, but then it isn’t a horror film per se so much as an energetic piece of conceptual feminist pop art. As such, complaints that it’s neither polished nor coherent are probably wide of the mark.

The overall mood of febrile dream somewhat carries the wayward tenor of the narrative and the fact that characters seem to inhabit different fictional worlds entirely

Aggressively post-modern in mining multiple horror veins, and with anarchic fuck-the-patriarchy energies, it’s perhaps most of all a fantasy in the menstrual vein that runs from Valerie and Her Week of Wonders to Ginger Snaps and beyond. Fans of Reeder’s numerous shorts and previous genre-tweaking features Knives And Skin and Night’s End will appreciate her latest, which is otherwise likeliest to connect with viewers at the cult horror and LGBT+ intersection; those who like their chills by the genre book are likely to be considerably less entertained. Shudder will release the film on their streaming platform in major territories, including the USA and UK.

The film’s prime asset is young star Kiah McKirnan (from Night Sky and Mare Of Easttown, also currently in Berlin Encounters title The Adults). She plays Jonny, short for Jonquil, a 17-year-old living with elderly dad Gene and keeping the household financed with a nocturnal career in burglary – something she does expertly, and stylishly in a cool trenchcoat. But why do she and Gene experience simultaneous nosebleeds? And why does his face have a habit of shimmying in the mirror in cheap-and-cheerful flurries of VFX spasms? 

Before these questions are answered, Jonny is sent to live with her great aunt Hildie (a regal, quizzical Alicia Silverstone). She starts at a new school which is run by raging eccentrics – including a nurse whose face increasingly disappears under bandages and sticking plaster (part of an outré strand of cosmetic surgery gags) and manic Principal Burke (Christopher Lowell), who puts his pupils through drills to practice safety in case of massacres. As it happens, several female students are missing, as hinted by a prelude that winkingly plays on the Halloween tradition of the masked stalker POV. 

But perhaps Jonny and her new friends, including fellow Black outsider and eventual lover Elektra (Ireon Roach), can rescue the abductees. In fact, Jonny should be amply qualified, since she discovers she has the gift of ‘Forevering’, as Hildie puts it – roughly defined as “turbo-charged empathy”. The path to resolution proves twisty, surreal, at times goofily facetious, and bloody as hell – with Jonny periodically, as it were, producing copious floods of gore, which sometimes form a pathway to a sort of scarlet-tinged underwater dimension.  

The overall mood of febrile dream somewhat carries the wayward, digressive tenor of the narrative and the fact that characters seem to inhabit different fictional worlds entirely: while some, like a creepy local cop, seem to have walked straight off slasher sub-genre main street, Silverstone’s genially lofty sorceress feels much more from Hocus Pocus or Buffy territory, hence presumably the casting of this very era-associated actress. 

Throughout the chaos, though, it’s McKirnan’s unflappable performance and energetic humour that hold it all together, whether Jonny is raising a quizzical eyebrow at the goings-on or freaking out at full frenzy. The score, by Yeah Yeah Yeahs musician Nick Zinner, lays on extra atmospherics with retro Tangerine Dream-y electronics of the sort revived by Stranger Things. Sevdije Kastrati’s photography fits the pulpy mood, even if the murky textures and overuse of claustrophobic green and orange tones sometimes create a more oppressive atmosphere that really serves the film.