By Simon Thompson
Writer/director Jenifer Reeder’s Perpetrator is a narcolepsy inducing stroll through every horror cliché in the book. Despite the movie displaying some eye-catching cinematography and slick editing, the fact they are there doesn’t negate the fact that Perpetrator is a tepid and underwhelming experience as a total package.
The plot of Perpetrator follows Jonny (Kiah McKirnan), a teenage girl living in a town that has an alarming and rapidly rising rate of young women going missing. Jonny isn’t the most sensible decision maker in the world, so her dad Gene (Tim Hopper) sends her to live with her aunt Hilde (Alicia Silverstone now acutely in the Troy McClure starring vehicles phase of her career) to straighten her life out. Upon arriving however, Jonny discovers that there is far more to her aunt and her new high school than initially meets the eye.
The acting in Perpetrator is more wooden than the Oregon trail, while it doesn’t help that the sound is mixed as if it has been recorded thousands of depths below sea level, McKirnan and the rest of the supporting cast show very little emotion scene to scene, which given some of the plot points later in the movie is especially jarring . Supporting characters such as stereotypical dumb histrionic jock Kirk (Sasha Kuznetsov) feel like background characters you would encounter in The Breakfast Club or Rockstar’s Bully rather than fully formed three dimensional human beings.
Alicia Silverstone in her performance as Hilde is the only cast member who can hold her head high. Silverstone, who has sadly been in a form of semi-career purgatory for a long time now shows off the charisma and comedy chops which made her such a bright star in the mid-late 1990s in the first place. Giving a campy, over the top performance, she is seemingly the only actor in the cast showing any kind of personality.
To give credit where its due however, Perpetrator does have some fantastic cinematography. Sevdije Kastrati’s adoption of a colour scheme which is half Dario Argento in his heyday and half John Carpenter is beautiful to look at, stylistic flourishes such as kaleidoscope style breaking down of an image during one of the movie’s key scenes, demonstrates just how strong Kastrati’s understanding of what makes a great horror shot truly is.
Shot on location in Chicago during one of the city’s notoriously bleak winters, the location’s visuals provide an eery gothic atmosphere perfect for the story Reeder is trying to tell, with Kastrati’s cinematography capturing the city’s chilly midwestern beauty perfectly.
Overall despite some visual flourishes here and there, Perpetrator’s uninteresting script, bland acting, lightweight characterisations, and cliched plot far outweigh any of its positive qualities. The only capacity that I would recommend this movie in is if you want to find out what Alicia Silverstone is doing with herself nowadays.
Perpetrator is available on Blu-Ray now from Arrow Video.
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