Though we tend to associate anything scary with hiding under the blankets until the fear goes away, horror storytelling is, at its best, an act of expansion, a swelling of reality as we know it. Yes, horror can make us recoil, but good horror storytellers know that after the initial scare comes a realization that our world is a little stranger, a little more challenging, than we previously knew it to be. That’s part of the thrill, after the lights come up and your heart rate returns to normal. That helps explain why horror, with its tales of outsiders and weirdos persisting in a world that demands they conform, returns time and time again to tales of metamorphosis, growth and radical acceptance of the monstrous. It’s fertile thematic ground that, in good hands, carries with it visceral terrors and profound chills. It’s here that Jennifer Reeder’s Perpetrator finds purchase, and grows into something dark, beautiful and compelling.
The character of the film’s title is a mask-wearing psycho who, in opening beats that will be familiar to any student of horror cinema, abducts teenage girls and takes them back to his own personal chamber of horrors. He’s already responsible for a number of disappearances and deaths in an upscale part of town when Jonny (Kiah McKirnan) shows up to live with her Aunt Hildie (Alicia Silverstone, relishing every second of her performance) after years of living with a father who has no idea how to handle her. After spending her days breaking into cars and burglarizing houses, Jonny feels the immediate culture shock of Hildie’s elegant, restrained life, complete with attendance at a fancy private school lorded over by a demanding principal (Christopher Lowell) who forces his students into brutal drills to ward off everything from school shooters to would-be kidnappers.
But the changes in Jonny’s life are more than external. On her 18th birthday, she experiences a profound and violent change that Hildie refers to as “Forevering,” a shift in her biological makeup that grants her the gift of radical, unflinching empathy as well shapeshifting. Before her own eyes, Jonny is becoming a new kind of creature, and her shifting existence is about to put her face-to-face with the killer taking young girls.
Though the horror elements are present, and quite chilling, from the very beginning, Reeder (V/H/S/94) also launches her tale with elements of dark fantasy and primal mystery, expanding Jonny’s world as she comes to grips with her new abilities and the consequences of her gifts. Visual metaphors are laced through this process, from a toilet soaked in blood to an 18th birthday cake with powerful digestive aftereffects, giving the whole affair an added flavor of body horror— even folk horror—as the weight of Jonny’s strange lineage begins to set in. It’s a wonderful blending of subgenres, but what makes Perpetrator work is how committed Reeder remains to evolving the story with each new act.