Perpetrator

Once upon a time in the late 1990s, there was a TV show called Sabrina the Teenage Witch, the story of a regular white American teenager who lived with her aunts and awoke on her sixteen birthday to learn she was a witch. Jennifer Reeder’s PERPETRATOR is like the bastard cousin of this tale, transmuted into a gore and body-horror-informed feminist slasher. Jonny is a teenage girl living with a father who can’t deal with her, so she is sent to her aunt (Alicia Silverstone, another 1990s relic), who reveals her niece’s powers to her through a cake with sixteen candles. In Jonny’s new life, people seem even stranger than she is: all the adults are violent, and girls go missing by the week. But Jonny and her classmates are no damsels in distress; rather smarter and more powerful than everyone around them, they are more than capable of taking matters into their own hands. As things get ever more dangerous, the film indulges its own twisted fantasies of detail: the ways in which bodies mutate, the grisly specifics of the attacks on young women, and the special qualities of blood, all of which open up new dimensions. (Lucía Salas)

In the presence of Jennifer Reeder.

On Thursday, October 26, 2023 there will be a panel at the VIENNALE ZENTRALE with Jennifer Reeder, Claire Simon and Martha Mechow. More information HERE!

Jennifer Reeder: WHITE TRASH GIRL (1995, K), ACCIDENTS AT HOME AND HOW THEY HAPPEN (2008), SEVEN SONGS ABOUT THUNDER (2010, K), A MILLION MILES AWAY (2014, K), MARIETTA BRIMBLE (2016, K), CRYSTAL LAKE (2016, K), SIGNATURE MOVE (2017), LOLA, 15 (2017, K), KNIFES AND SKIN (2019), THE DUNES (2019, K), FOREVERING (2021, K), NIGHT’S END (2022)