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The movies of Jennifer Reeder have an unmistakable vibe. Her acclaimed brief movies, together with “All Small Bodies” and “Crystal Lake,” have been proven on The Criterion Channel, and her function movie “Knives and Skin” has been proven at Berlin and Tribeca.
Reeder’s movies, which have been described because the assembly level between David Lynch and John Hughes, share little by way of plot, however all bear an unmistakable eeriness, an otherworldliness that might solely be Reeder. Jennifer Reeder has cemented her standing as a horror doyenne along with her fourth function movie, “Perpetrator,” premiering within the Panorama part of this 12 months’s Berlin International Film Festival.
READ MORE: The 25 Most Anticipated Horror Films Of 2023
Returning to her traditional theme park of girlhood, teenagedom, and the bizarre methods by which their our bodies could be weaponized, her protagonist is the quick-witted Jonny (Kiah McKirnan) who, like all youngsters are wont to do, thinks there’s one thing flawed along with her—an irregular coronary heart murmur, like she has two hearts as a substitute of 1. Spontaneous nostril bleeds—a wierd shimmering on her face. When Jonny’s father, who’s scuffling with some debilitating however undisclosed ailment, sends her off to a brand new highschool and underneath the care of her aunt Hildie (Alicia Silverstone), Jonny turns into reluctantly embroiled within the serial disappearances of native women.
Reeder and cinematographer Sevdije Kastrati (“Vera Dreams of the Sea”) take affect from giallo movies and teenage classics like “Heathers” to craft a world that blends the kitsch and the uncanny. Reeder’s movies all have an unnatural stiffness, which both works for you or doesn’t. Much like “Knives + Skin,” “Perpetrator” seems on the horror beneath the on a regular basis Americana, at a tradition struggling to reconcile a white picket fence preferrred with faculty shooter drills. A sequence of lacking women (“Girls go missing all the time, what’s the big deal,” says one of many characters) and a attainable serial killer on the unfastened don’t faze Johnny in any respect. When she discovers that every one the lacking women attached with the identical tall jock-boy Kirk (Sasha Kusnetsov), who additionally occurs to be the hapless police officer’s son, Jonny hatches a plan to set herself as much as be the killer’s subsequent’s sufferer and remedy the disappearances herself.
While the youngsters that populate the world of “Perpetrator” are world-weary, the adults are downright goofy. A working joke is the varsity nurse’s more and more bandaged face as she tries to halt the results of ageing. The faculty headmaster (Christopher Lowell) is a kooky and over-the-top disciplinarian who will run round his faculty screaming, “CODE MASSACRE! DOUBLE BLOOD BATH!” and punish the scholars in the event that they get mock-killed throughout the drill. Silverstone, who has but to have an enormous comeback second in the way in which a few of her beloved nineties contemporaries have not too long ago loved, doesn’t get that a lot to do, sadly. While she’s altogether sport for the world that Reeder has constructed, delivering her strains with a campy gravitas normally reserved for the very episodes of “Dynasty,” her position lives in a no-man’s-land of an overhyped cameo. When she is onscreen, you would like for extra of her. Either a witch, a vampire, or one thing fully completely different, Aunt Hildie has been round for hundreds of years (she’s been buried alive twice, she declared proudly) and is there to ease Jonny right into a world of shape-shifting, transformations, and an influence that’s been handed down by generations. Like a “possession in reverse,” this energy is undefined and fluid.
“Perpetrator” is very similar to that too. The plot is usually irrelevant, apart from the way it permits for Reeder’s concepts and imagery to movement. Oozing, gooey blood and messed-up faculty uniforms, secrets and techniques whispered in highschool bogs, glitter clothes, and uncanny face masks all meld collectively to create a movie wealthy in environment and artifice. [B+]
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