Perpetrator second-look review: an exceptionally assured, politically resonant horror

• Reviewed from the 2023 Berlin International Film Festival.

Emotionality is reframed as a potent weapon, rather than a flaw misogynistically invoked to deem women incapable, in Perpetrator, a smart high-school body horror in which empathy takes on supernatural qualities. Jennifer Reeder’s fourth feature is the strongest – and darkest – yet from the American director. Her exceptional affinity with teenage symbols and sensibilities underpins a growing, impressive body of work full of emotional resonance and music-driven flair. It includes her hit short A Million Miles Away (2014), in which a teen choir rehearses a Judas Priest song, and teen noir Knives and Skin (2019), about a girl’s Midwest disappearance. The influence of David Lynch, Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) can all be felt in Reeder’s uncanny, surrealistic latest film, which revels in playing with established genre tropes, and challenges our understanding of what is taboo and grotesque in queasy scenes of blood, orifices and manifested female energy.

Jonny (Kiah McKirnan), a headstrong force of nature with a missing mother, is about to turn 18. Her single father, whom she helps financially by breaking into houses and selling off the jewellery, is struggling with life and his daughter’s passage to maturity. He sends her to live with Hildie (former teen queen Alicia Silverstone, in inspired casting), a formidable maven in command of sculptured hair and strange knowledge. Numerous girls have vanished from Jonny’s new school after spending time with a chisel-cheeked serial dater whose father, a cop, cruises the town at night in his patrol car. An oozing, carmine-coloured birthday cake Hildie makes from an old family recipe fuels a transformation in Jonny and “a kind of possession in reverse” as her sensitivities are activated – fortunate timing, as Jonny is determined to get to the bottom of the spate of disappearances, and needs every power she can draw on.

The film winks archly at gothic staples, as a school nurse still bandaged after rhinoplasty asks invasive questions about sexual health and popularity, and Jonny’s walk to school takes her through a graveyard that any undead vampire would feel at home in. There is political substance to the satire: Reeder is committed to recognising the institutionalised layers of violence in America, and how risk is weighted differently according to race and gender, with the most vulnerable treated like criminals. Not every girl who has disappeared is missed equally in a town in which the police cannot be trusted, school defence drills raise anxiety while not defusing the actual threat, and attention can be as perilous as invisibility for Black women.