‘Perpetrator’ Review: Campy, Creepy and Buckets of Blood

Blood — viscous and darkish, venal and menstrual — soaks all over “Perpetrator,” Jennifer Reeder’s hyperbolic stab at the highschool slasher film. Noses seep and flooring are awash, the treacly ooze serving as each a coming-of-age image and a lubricant for a narrative whose misandry burns shiny and scorching.

“Girls like you just don’t know what you’ve got till it’s all gone,” a masked sadist breathes, hovering over Jonny Baptiste (Kiah McKirnan), a savvy highschool senior. He’s not the one predatory weirdo who threatens the college’s jumpy feminine college students, together with a creepy principal (Christopher Lowell) who oversees supposed self-defense lessons that warn in opposition to biting and screaming. Dating a chiseled alpha male named Kirk (Sasha Kuznetsov) appears particularly perilous, provided that his crushes hardly ever reappear in class.

Jonny’s house life is scarcely cozier. Lodged with a witchy great-aunt whose love language is snarling (Alicia Silverstone, disappointingly underused), the motherless teenager should navigate the ancestral superpower that her 18th birthday has lately bestowed: a turbocharged empathy that permits her to bodily mimic one other individual. And maybe catch a killer.

Screwy and unusual, “Perpetrator” is gleefully unsubtle, however its ensanguinated extra is a part of the enjoyable. (As is the casting of actors who seem like on their tenth repeat of twelfth grade.) The tone swivels from campy to menacing, outrageous to comedian; however Sevdije Kastrati’s oleaginous pictures has the surreal energy to nail a number of the film’s dottiest sequences, just like the killer siphoning his victims’ blood by a wound that resembles an indignant anus.

The movie’s most pleasurable concept, although, is its positioning of feminine empathy as armor as a substitute of Achilles’ heel. Gazing into the mirror, Jonny’s face wobbles and shifts; when the perpetrator is revealed, will she be prepared?

Perpetrator
Rated R for a disembodied coronary heart and a disgusting dessert. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters.