IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.
Released: 1st September
Seen: 2nd September
Horror as a genre is an ever-evolving beast but one thing it’s always great at is metaphor, using the story of the film to touch on heavy topics that might be harder to do in other genres. Sometimes it can work well, the problem of racism, specifically the more insidious subtle racism done by people who believe they aren’t racists, was handled wonderfully in Get Out. Sometimes it fails pretty spectacularly, like the gallant attempt to explore sexism and specifically the crisis of rape on college campuses which was the focus of the last Black Christmas film and ended up just not working (because it was a bad film, not because it was doing politics). Perpetrator is more on the upper end of that spectrum in terms of quality and idea, but its execution is just a little underdone.
Perpetrator takes place in a strange little school full of mostly young women, in particular a young Jonny Baptiste (Kiah McKirnan) who has been sent to live with her Aunt Hildie (Alicia Silverstone) while she attends this strange school where there are regular shooter drills where the principal pretends to shoot students in the face and where girls seem to go missing on a regular basis. Turning 18 is hard enough as it is, but for Jonny her 18th comes with strange visions, an extreme empathy that allows her to feel the pain of other people and eventually puts her right in the unrelenting path of a crazed serial killer… you know, normal teenage stuff.
From the very start, Perpetrator has a particularly strange tone that can be a little hard to get into. The tone feels a little bit like a foreign film where everyone doing the dubbing didn’t quite match the performances of the original, except this one is being done very intentionally. It’s a style that can border on camp, particularly in the performance by Alicia Silverstone who only has a few brief scenes but steals them all with a steady hand and a flair for dramatic hairstyles. Once you can buy into the style of the performances, it becomes a lot easier to enjoy the metaphorical tale being told here.
As should’ve been guessed by the title ‘Perpetrator’, this film focuses a lot on violence done towards women by people who they should be able to trust, including a scene that is somehow less subtle than an actual rape scene might be. Its bluntness about women going missing being easily ignored, the treatment of women in prominent positions by men who should be their equal or just how widespread this issue is ends up allowing Perpetrator to have some substantial power. It isn’t trying to hide what it’s doing, there is minimal subtlety here which sometimes works really well and sometimes pushes the film into just being kinda bad in parts.
The lack of subtlety in Perpetrator extends to the visuals, characters end up just randomly swimming in literal pools of blood because it’s a cool image or they’ll grow tiny buttholes on their chests that can have tubes put in them to transfer blood, imagery that’s meant to be weird and shocking that sometimes works wonderfully and sometimes just feels a bit overdone. There’s a scene where a character wearing a mask yells “I’d fuck me” which was terrifying when Buffalo Bill did it 30 years ago, now it’s kind of silly and it doesn’t feel like it was meant to be silly. This kind of issue happens a few times, moments where you can tell the audience is meant to be unnerved just don’t work.
It helps a lot that Perpetrator’s cast is completely committed to the tone that’s been set, their performances are right for this strange style of film (it feels very Giallo-influenced, insert obvious comparison to Suspiria right here) and they all sell pretty much everything they’ve been given. Sure, there are times when some things don’t quite work, particular revelations that needed a better setup to have a real impact but it doesn’t slow things down that much. You never really feel pulled out of the story because, once you buy into the style of performance they’ve chosen, it never really deviates from that.
Perpetrator might not be great, but it is pretty damn good with enough creative ideas and visual flair to pique the interest of horror fans. There are a lot of elements to this film that work fantastically well, only mildly hampered by the moments where things go just a little further than they probably intended and land somewhere in the realm of camp. It’s a big swing and even when those sometimes miss, there’s still usually something that’s a little interesting. It might not be for everyone, but those who are able to get into its tone are in for a treat.
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