Moody, hysterical, hyper-emotional, or just plain over-sensitive: what if being too much could also be your superpower? Perpetrator (2023), Jennifer Reeder’s blood-slicked supernatural noir, which premiered in this year's Panorama section at the Berlinale, takes this premise as the springboard for its snaking tale of adolescent metamorphosis and missing high school girls. Reinvigorating the creaky tropes of genre filmmaking after a successful career in the art world, Reeder parses her politics of feminist empathy and patriarchal critique through the visual motifs of body horror and the gothic, bringing to Perpetrator a playful and shape-shifting allegorical twist.
Wild child Jonny Baptiste (Kiah McKirnan) is an out-of-control teenager and petty thief whose body is changing in all the wrong ways. Her single, ailing father sends her off to the Victorian mansion of an isolated aunt Hildie—played, in an inventive choice of casting, by the ’90s icon and Clueless star Alicia Silverstone. On Jonny’s eighteenth birthday, as she lies poised on the cusp of adulthood, aunt Hildie transfers her niece supernatural powers through a slice of glittery cake oozing viscous crimson. Passing down the witchy matrilineal line, this family spell is known as “forevering,” a kind of possession in reverse where the afflicted embodies others’ emotions and throws them back out into the world. When a spate of high school girls suddenly go missing in her new hometown, Jonny chases the perpetrator with recently acquired powers, letting nothing stand in her way.
Perpetrator is Reeder’s fourth feature and shares with some of her earlier work a continued fascination with young female outsiders and the fluid yet also traumatic in-betweenness of adolescence. Once again, Reeder points to how women’s bodies are controlled and manipulated by society, reclaiming abjection and excessive emotion as affective strengths. In her infamous video-art series White Trash Girl (1995-1997), Reeder plays a blonde, literally toxic misfit who was the product of a rape and abandoned in a sewer, only to wreak biological warfare on anyone stupid enough to get in her way. Both Reeder’s heroine and Jonny own their misfit status, as well as their propensity to leak blood, embodying qualities that are normally maligned. “Anger is an energy,” sang Johnny Rotten, and he was right. Jonny becomes a lightning rod for the pent-up rage of a broken society, which she refracts outwards and for the purpose of solidarity. Reeder celebrates how empathy and anger, if properly harnessed, can be critical tools of feminist agency.
The signs of a collective trauma are strongly felt in the contemporaneous American landscape: from the active shooter drills and exaggerated plastic-surgery wounds to the seething male aggression of the film’s high school boys. Though the film’s portrayal of teenage sexuality feels particularly Gen Z in its unlabelled fluidity, its visual world is rooted in the past: the ’90s golden age of high school movies, the luridness of 1980s classic slashers, and the spectral, surrealist suburbia of David Lynch. This creates an interesting, if uneven, tension between the film’s present-tense politics and past-tense nostalgia.
With nods to the puberty-triggered telekinesis of Carrie (1976), Perpetrator’s sanguineous color palette visually “surfs the crimson wave,” to borrow from Clueless. In its more abstract sections, Perpetrator is closer to a menstrual mood piece than a full-on slasher, in which bubbling hemoglobin oozes for the thrill of transgression rather than the terror of a body in peril. These sections embody the spirit of feminist film performance; at one point, the film’s bloodiness reminded me of VALIE EXPORT’s …REMOTE REMOTE… (1973), in which the artist painfully cuts herself and drips into a bowl of milk. Director of photography Sevdije Kastrati keeps the film’s colors mired in muddiness, with associative choices rich in magentas and ochres: a far cry from the neon-streaked campiness of Reeder’s last film at the Berlinale, 2019’s Knives and Skin.
Perpetrator’s horror elements are here in service to a politics of feminist revenge and free-associative flights of fancy rather than any jump scares or neat generic conclusions. Reeder’s art-world background is evident in some of the film’s more experimental choices: from its dream-like superimpositions and images shot through prisms to the arch, stiffly mannered acting style, which feels closer to the campy staginess of underground film than more traditional genre offerings. This is bound to be divisive, but for those who freely dabble in both camps, such choices are often satisfying. Perpetrator’s made-for-TV aesthetic is pushed to stylistic extremes, transforming the American high school experience into something eerie and phantasmagoric. My main frustration was that sometimes it doesn’t go far enough: why hold back from plunging into full-on surrealism?
I spoke to Jennifer Reeder at the Berlinale about shape-shifting, the myth of the mean girl, and the importance of empathy in the post-Trump era.
NOTEBOOK: Where did the idea for Perpetrator come from?
JENNIFER REEDER: It comes directly from experiences I've had working with teenage girls in my shorts and in Knives and Skin. I would constantly be asked what it was like working with “so many girls.” These people were coming from the assumption that working with girls would be dreadful. We are a culture that's obsessed with young women’s youth and beauty. But we've also built this machine to either disrupt their evolution or entirely annihilate them.
I thought about the ways that we talk about girls who have agency over their lives and sexuality: they're “wild” or “out of control.” These terms are not meant to amplify that agency but diminish it. I wanted to tell a story about a wild, out-of-control girl who harnesses this quality and lets it become her superpower. In a way, this is a classic shapeshifter story, but I knew that I didn't want a vampire or werewolf. I wanted Perpetrator to feel believable, to ground its logic in reality, even if it had elements that were mythological or allegorical.
NOTEBOOK: I'm really interested in the shape-shifting aspect because I'm so used to seeing the woman-to-animal metamorphosis in genre films as a way of codifying fears around female sexuality, like, for example, Cat People. Here the supernatural powers feel like an initiation into the ways of the world: a realization that patriarchy kills women, and the feminist impulse to fight back.
REEDER: At the end of the day, many of the girls I make films about are still children. Even if they are very self-possessed young women, they are still looking to the adult world to make sure there's someone there to protect them. In so many of my films, I like presenting adults who are also coming of age. But in Perpetrator, I wanted to put some adults in the room that are not just making mistakes but actively harming the girls. The girls cannot depend on all the adults. I’m not a big follower of superhero franchises, but I do like the moment in those films when someone first gets their powers and doesn’t know what to do with them: they’re like a pony on wobbly legs. I wanted to have the shapeshifting powers she has not be taken as given. She doesn’t know if she likes it or what to do with it, but it’s happening to her, which is sort of how life is. Things happen to us and it doesn’t matter if you like it or not, you have to keep going.
This is something I’ve learnt from the women in my life. I wanted to address the lineage of female family knowledge. I’ve watched the women in my life do things they don’t want to do but they go ahead and do it anyway. What I've learned from so many women mentors in my life is that we are very fucking resilient. In Jonny's coming of age, she’s in her biological adolescence, so things are literally changing in her, but she’s also learning about feeling all of her feelings.
NOTEBOOK: Aunt Hildie calls “forevering” a “profound spectral empathy” with others’ pain and suffering. This feels like a really interesting metaphor for the empathy we feel when we watch films, but also I thought about the inherited trauma of being a woman. What were you drawing on with this theme?
REEDER: I was developing this idea when Donald Trump was still president. Every day I would wake up and I think of how some people are truly physically incapable of empathy, and yet that emotion could be a game changer in this world. It doesn't cost anything or take much effort. You just have to try to connect with how other people might be feeling. There's so many people who are doing that and making this world a much better place, obviously. I did some research around empaths whose abilities are aligned more with clairvoyants or psychics. It's not a proven science, of course, and it’s not for me to say whether I believe in it or not. But I have to make the audience believe it.
What if you could feel someone's feelings, but then use it back at them as your weapon? I wanted to explore this stereotype of not being able to trust women because they’re “too emotional.” Perpetrator is much more related to my grad school work, and the White Trash Girl series in particular. They are these adventures of a girl superhero with toxic bodily fluids, just like Jonny has magic blood. White Trash Girl really utilized the abject, transgression, and grossness. The protagonist’s misfit status in society based on her class and gender, and so she uses that as a weapon.
NOTEBOOK: On that idea of the abject and bodily fluids, I wanted to ask about the film’s color scheme. The film starts off quite dark and murky and then kind of explodes into menstrual color. How did you work on the film’s color?
REEDER: When our DP Sevdije Kastrati got attached, we had a lot of conversations about the palette of the film. I explicitly didn’t want pinks or purples. Knives and Skin vibrated with these soft, femme colors, but I wanted Perpetrator to feel like it was grounded in the earth. I wanted Jonny’s magical powers to have their own life. So we leaned into navy blues and ambers, and the colors of rich, dark, red blood. Even in color correction, we darkened the blood a bit.
NOTEBOOK: As someone who came of age in the ’90s I was very happy to see Alicia Silverstone in the film. What was the casting process like? Did you envisage her for this role from the beginning?
REEDER: I had originally wanted Alicia for Knives and Skin but for Perpetrator it just felt right. I wanted someone who was a real-life shapeshifter. Alicia Silverstone was introduced to the world as a teenager. She had this blonde-bombshell cachet as a very young woman. I am in awe of her ownership over that early part in her career. Recently she did this advert where she returns to the Clueless character, which just premiered at the American Super Bowl last Sunday! Alicia was also criticized early on for her choices as a mother and became a public target. She is someone who has made some really interesting creative choices and I knew that this was not a part that she had ever played before.
Prior to casting her, we had some great conversations. She was just so smart, funny, curious, and open. She had really thoroughly read and thought about the script, and had tons of questions. When she got attached officially, which really didn't take very much time at all, she sank into the script. I suggested she watch The Hunger, because Catherine Deneuve was a big inspiration for Hilde, and she became obsessed. Alicia loved the idea of morphing from this fresh, blonde, Southern Californian girl into something much darker.
NOTEBOOK: The shadow of the epidemic of high school shootings stalks this film. I’m particularly disturbed by how students are being forced to prepare for these situations, as if it's their responsibility and not the state’s to protect them. Are the parallels between high school shootings and violence against women intentional? That it’s “on us” not to dress slutty, for example?
REEDER: Absolutely. We live in a culture that tries to train women how not to get sexually assaulted, rather than telling people to keep their hands to themselves. The US has no interest in dealing with mental illness or institutional racism. It's just so messed up that it's on the kids to be the ones to save themselves rather than be protected by the teachers or the government. I have school-age kids and I asked one of them if they had active shooter drills and what the directive was. He said, “hide.” That’s it? I work at a university and one of our principles is to Engage, Escape, Invade. What does that even mean? You’re meant to engage with the gunman and grab the gun? Or hide, run, and hope for the best? That scene has always been in the script and I firmly stand by it but I'm also curious how it’s going to be received.
NOTEBOOK: Your feature films have brilliantly inclusive casting, I would argue before diverse casting became a “thing” in the industry. Has this been an intentional part of your process or did it emerge naturally?
REEDER: I’ve always wanted to put an authentic range of people in front of my camera. That was my experience growing up in an intersectional neighborhood and going through schools in Ohio. Unless I am making something explicitly about Whiteness, in which case I would homogenize the cast, it just wouldn’t have occurred to me otherwise. I want those characters to just be living their life. It feels important that Jonny’s sexuality be open and fluid and not something that she has to declare. It just is. Race in this film also doesn’t need to be a factor that they are dealing with on a daily basis; it’s a given. I didn’t want it to be something that gets explained.
NOTEBOOK: Speaking of race, I’m fascinated by your White Trash Girl mid-’90s persona. This investigation of Whiteness came out around the same time that Richard Dyer was developing the field of Whiteness studies with his landmark book. Why did it feel important to explore this at the time?
REEDER: At the time it felt really fruitful to think about Whiteness and white culture outside of white supremacy. Maybe even more than it was at that time, it’s still a topic that is very hard for white people to explore and unpack. It was also coming out of that third-wave riot grrrl feminism which wasn’t as inclusive and intersectional as it should have been. On the one hand, that work feels like it was coming out of a very specific period of time. But the entry point into unpacking Whiteness is still oftentimes through class and/or gender. Whether it's thinking about how the US is still unable to think about white poverty, or the way that white women voted for Donald Trump, because it’s a place of privilege that they hold dear and benefit from enormously.
NOTEBOOK: You’ve come out of the worlds of experimental film, video, and performance art and transitioned into narrative feature filmmaking, especially genre films. Has this transition afforded you any freedoms you wouldn’t otherwise have had. And vice versa—what can you do in the art world that you maybe can’t do in feature filmmaking?
REEDER: I definitely made a choice to move my work out of galleries and museums because I wanted to expand that audience. I wanted to force people to watch something from beginning to end, in a more linear way: to have that shared cinematic experience that is so valuable. I always make the movies that I want to make. But sometimes reading reviews—which I haven’t yet by the way!—I realize there are still people who approach my work by comparing it to conventional, commercial storytelling. One of the reasons I love to premiere at Berlinale, or show this work outside of the US, is because there is a different awareness of the way I tell stories, or an appreciation for the nuances of visual storytelling. There is sometimes an expectation to dumb it down with feature-length filmmaking especially: people want things sewed up and the gaps closed. They want the more experimental, visual moments to be anchored to something logical. I just don’t want to do that. I can’t. It’s impossible to do, honestly.
I was warned that this film might not be arthouse enough for the arthouse people, and might not be genre enough for the genre people. That’s not how I go into making something. Having said that, I don’t set out to alienate an audience. I’ve always been provocative and love to stir things up. White Trash Girl was 100 percent meant to irritate people. But I was a younger person then. Now I want to make audiences feel connected to the work. Still, I wouldn’t go back to the art gallery.
NOTEBOOK: You’ve said in interviews that you are committed to “ending the myth of the mean girl.” I love that. Can you elaborate?
REEDER: It goes back to your first question and the fact that people are terrified of young women. This is the myth of the mean girl. It’s not to say that there are no young women who are not vicious to each other or their family members, but it’s really a survival strategy. It’s an armor that they can put up in order to defend themselves on a daily basis. These girls just need to walk out the door and they are vulnerable. However you want to perceive them, just make sure you’re terrified of them because they’re absolutely terrified of the entire world and don’t want anyone to know it.
There are no mean girls. There are just girls who are trying to survive their life. But fine, be afraid. Just stay away from them!