A girl walking home alone is such a classic beginning for a horror film that it’s a trope (and title) in itself. This particular opening lends itself to endless continuations and explorations, and when you have a director like Jennifer Reeder, whose creativity is matched only by a willingness to not only subvert but immerse herself in our bloody fascinations, an old story can get retold like no other.
So once a pink-clad light in the darkness is snatched away and risks being dimmed forever, it’s unlikely the mysterious heavy breather responsible isn’t gonna be lionized as a criminal genius who gets to meet the Joker. At least not when we’re introduced to the heroine of Reeder’s Perpetrator, the street-savvy, low-level teenage thief Jonny (Kiah McKirnan). Throw in a Brontë shout-out less than ten minutes in, you know there’s feminist vengeance in store.
There are plenty of magical portents before Jonny is shipped off to be mentored by her aunt Hildie (a very emo Alicia Silverstone) to prepare her for the changes her body is already starting to undergo as she approaches her 18th birthday. Called the Forevering, the women in her family not only feel all the feelings around them, but they can pass those emotions along to fuel their own power. When girls at her school start to go missing, Jonny’s abilities may be key to taking her peers from hunted to hunters.
Reeder mines their surroundings, in particular shooter drills, for grim humor about the violence we accept in the name of appeasing the patriarchy, but until the bloody body horror starts to have more bite in the second half, it’s a bit laughable to have a deeply stylized script in a less-than-stylized setting. When Silverstone proclaims, “I am quite something. Ferocious, repulsive, magnificent,” it belongs in a setting that would make the Love Witch proud, not in a place where all too familiar threats like creepy school principals and cops are running amok.
The reveals aren’t a surprise by the end, but Reeder isn’t trying to make her heroines as good as their villains—she’s attempting to harness female potential to its sharpest ends. By the time that end arrives, “female hysteria” has become power in itself, a collective scream channeled to a fine point, where radical empathy is fueled by blood. 100 min.