My quick rating – 4.2/10. Perpetrator just tried way too hard to be artsy. And the school culture they attempted to emulate just wanted to be Heathers mixed with The Craft so badly (Forbidden Fruits, anyone?). This might have worked in their favor had it been done well, and it was NOT. Writer/Director Jennifer Reeder does show a keen eye behind the camera for the proper angles and flow of scenes, but she missed the mark in the story.
A teen named Jonny, played by Kiah McKirnan, is shown more or less fending for herself in a home where she seems unwanted. I also have to add that McKirnan very much seemed bored in her performance throughout Perpetrator. I don’t know if that was by design or if she just didn’t have any enthusiasm for the movie as a whole.
Moving on, she is sent to live with her Aunt, and I was glad to see Alicia Silverstone pop up in a role that suited her fine, even if she overacted it a bit. There are plenty of strange visions and dialogue going on that is meant to draw you in; however, I found it like fluff, as I mentioned, trying to add artistic flair. Like the entire story, this is all just kind of swept under the rug and not explained at all. But the general idea is that on Jonny’s 18th birthday, she goes through some form of transformation, which is called the Forevering.
A catchy title describing, well, you aren’t really sure. Mimicking others’ appearance, sort of, I don’t know exactly what they were going for in these new “powers” that are bestowed upon her. The ending will not help at all in explaining them either, more or less adding to the confusion. But when a kid from school goes missing, she puts her Sherlock Holmes foot forward and vows to find the culprit.
From there, it is just scenes that don’t seem connected very well to the whole mystery of the young adults’ disappearances and who may be behind it all. Perpetrator is just stuck trying to be too many things at once and not excelling in any of them. Is it about female maturation during childhood abandonment, or is this a revenge-type flick against male oppression?
I may be reaching on that or any of the many other things you could pick out as potential underlying themes here. It may just be a very mediocre fantasy flick about a supernatural sect of humans that come of age right around the time they can vote. And while it doesn’t fail as many horror flix hitting the streaming bus have lately, it still just left me shrugging. Oh well, it did look aesthetically nice, but not something I would recommend. I am sure there is an audience for it, though, just not me.
