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‘Perpetrator’ Review: Jennifer Reeder Directs Alicia Silverstone in a Lo-Fi, Costumey High School Horror-Noir
Jessica Kiang Syrupy red blood oozing between champing white teeth: If there’s a signature image in Jennifer Reeder’s “Perpetrator,” that might just be it. It’s a striking horror motif but, jumbled in amongst so many other striking horror motifs — nose splints and tattered school uniforms, bloodied fishnet stockings and features-blurring plastic facemasks — by the third or fourth repetition, it loses its visceral punch. As with so much else in Reeder’s overstuffed but underpowered third feature, the oral hemorrhaging is a fetishized detail that seems to have come unstuck from what it might mean. Is it vampirism? Lycanthropy? Psychokinesis? Acute gingivitis? Who’s to say, and, more to the point, why to care?
