Perpetrator
It’s a hard knock life for Jonquil “Jonny” Baptiste, her mother having vanished when she was a baby and living with her father Gene who has issues of the kind doctors aren’t equipped to handle, though at least he doesn’t hit her, unlike her fence who gives her a cut of the cash for the luxury objects she steals to order when he feels she’s holding out on him.
Gene feeling he is no longer able to take care of her, Jonny is sent away to stay with her Aunt Hildie, a welcome as cold as that of plastic surgery obsessed school nurse Marcy though with questioning only marginally less intrusive and nothing compared to what Principal Burke has in mind for all his students, malevolent active shooter drills where he plays the gleeful gunman.
Written and directed by Night’s End’s Jennifer Reeder, with girls missing across campus the hunt should be on for the Perpetrator but Principal Burke (Christopher Lowell) is more concerned with maintaining control over his charges, telling them if they are ever caught to stay silent and submissive, a cooperation Jonny (Night Sky’s Kiah McKirnan) is unlikely to offer even as her body begins to betray her.
Aunt Hildie (Clueless’ Alicia Silverstone) describing the sensation as “forevering,” a profound spectral empathy which runs in the women of the family, “women feeling all the feelings,” for inexperienced Jonny it is both profound and overwhelming, a connection first through her blood to those around her, causing spontaneous nosebleeds, but later hearing the voices of the abducted girls and channelling their fear.
Perpetrator a film of many strong ideas, thematic and visual, they are in futile search of a good story and better characters, Jonny’s classmates presumably intended as stoic in the face of cruel and relentless pressure but presented as apathetic to the disappearance of their classmates and accepting of outrageous bullying from authority figures, like Raw existing in a world which requires fantastical leaps to suspend disbelief but depicted as blunt reality.
The few moments of brilliance such as the nightmarish submergence into the blood world lost in the blandness of the whole, the blending of eXistenZ with empowerment and sisterhood might not have scored such an own goal had it nor portrayed all the men as lecherous, duplicitous, socially handicapable monsters, the revelation of the misogynist organ harvesting kidnapper and their sidekicks exactly who could have been guessed from their first scenes.
Perpetrator is available on Shudder now
