Perpetrator

 Perpetrator is an interesting surreal horror movie thing from writer/director Jennifer Reeder. I arrived at this one after liking Night's End, her previous feature (yay for auteur theory!); While that one was a fairly straightforward film that went off the rails towards the end, Perpetrator's a film that barely has any rails from the beginning.

 It's got a simple plot that provides some very basic structure, but then it's happy to forget about it for a while and provide all sorts of weird diversions. And it definitely has themes, but they are, again, all over the place, and never get a lot of traction. It's a cagey, ornery film that focuses on the feel it's trying to communicate rather than on any mundane concerns like coherence or plausibility.

 Jonquil 'Jonny' Baptiste (Kiah McKirnan) is a delinquent teen with huge hair (which, in a nice touch, keeps changing shape throughout the film) who's introduced breaking and entering. The earnings from her modest heist go towards paying the rent, as her father has some unspecified illness which seems to have left him invalid.
 After a nasty attack of whatever it is he's got, Jonny's dad sends her over to live with her aunt (Alicia Silverstone, giving a wonderfully unhinged performance), and to a new school run by a rampaging misogynist (Christopher Lowell, also very funny) who delights in screaming at the girls that they're dead after he mock-kills them in a school shooting drill (announced over the intercom as 'code massacre - level bloodbath!'. Oh, and a bunch of girls around Jonny's age have been disappearing recently around her new neighbourhood. Just a small detail, nothing important.

 Jonnie is also developing some sort of supernatural power - her aunt, who acts as a sort of paranormal tutor, describes it as 'extreme empathy' and calls 'the forevering' which we can all agree is a really stupid name that we will never mention again. In practice, Jonny mostly uses it to make digital-looking ripples course through her face and to weird out other people.
 When it's an acquaintance's turn to go missing, Jonny decides to harness her newly discovered powers towards  constructive ends and hatches a pretty stupid plan to find the (pregnant pause) Perpetrator.

 That almost sounds normal! But, as mentioned, the film constantly veers off on (often funny) little tangents, and doesn't really pay a lot of attention to its own plot. It's not that much more egregious at it than, say, the last few Mission Imposibles, except that in those movies the story goes down the toilet so Tom Cruise can jump off some really high place - here instead you get a scene where Jonny is forced to eat a lipstick (a scene that, incidentally, really grossed me out). And there's never any pretense that the story makes sense.

 There's a tangle of feminist messages running through the script, none of them subtle, but the main thrust of the movie seemed to me to be about young people figuring things out and banding together against the previous generation (even the sympathetic older women are flawed and kind of part of the problem). Critically, there's a shift in Jonny's attitude as soon as she gets her superpowered empathy; I've seen way worse ways to signal maturity.

 Blood and other bodily fluids flow freely, and there's a tiny bit of body horror (grafted anuses which later turn into vaginas; Freud would have a field day here). But it's not particularly gory and it never even tries to be scary, either, though it's got a good handle on atmosphere (cinematographer: Sevdije Kastrati). I guess you could say it will not conform to genre norms (badabum-tish!).

 So... it's a mess. An interesting, entertaining mess that's full of weird little vignettes that never seem to pull in the same direction. Some of them are funny, some of them are insightful; None of them boring.