Whereas Twin Peaks tackles the small-town case of a missing teenager with a moody, otherworldly sense of dreaminess and with a rich consult of characters, Knives and Skin, the latest film from experimental director Jennifer Reeder, tackles the same subject matter with abrasive levity that feels more like a mentally ill Hallmark movie than the work of a Lynchian prodigy. The comparison to Twin Peaks is rather apt when speaking about the loose beginnings of the plot, but this film, in less than two hours, becomes more of an overstuffed, uneaten turducken than a compelling mystery or an artful satire. Unbound by genre and cinematic conventions, veteran experimental director Jennifer Reeder creates a strange musical-thriller-comedy hybrid that is cerebral and gutsy, but it loses most audiences and attention spans in its mausoleum of loose, pedantic, and thematically infantile ideas.
The first real scene that prompts the story to begin shows an isolated high schooler known as Carolyn (Raven Whitley) rejecting the sexual advances of a football jock known as Andy (Ty Olwin). She’s soon bruised and abandoned by a pond and pronounced missing shortly thereafter, as we see Andy try to cover his tracks after this incident. What dispenses as a result is best told through the screen, as we are exposed to the underbelly of this town’s seemingly facile life. Jennifer Reeder, in Knives and Skin, focuses on the effects that this girl’s disappearance has on the small Midwest community the film is set in, but the film’s kickstart doesn’t have enough steam to propel it towards the hope of a resolution. There is the gossip of an investigation into the tragedy, but no serious investigating occurs in the film’s runtime – only the reverberations felt by this community.
The film is better situated in regard to its staunch femininity and commentary on a depressed suburbia. Characters refer to a binary spectrum of prudishness to sluttiness, as well as to virginity, motherhood, female empowerment, female objectification, and self-image. Vulvic imagery is also quite apparent. The character of Joanna, a friend of Carolyn, experiences the town’s patriarchal tendencies when she needs to make money by selling her mother’s used underwear to the school principal. The male principal is played as a gross, one-dimensional pervert – much like many other male characters throughout the film. Two female friends become lovers, exchanging objects at one point that have been exposed to each woman’s genitals. One girl is the object of a male friend’s attention – pretending to need tutoring when in reality he just wants to spend time with his crush. Indeed, much of the film’s interpersonal relationships unfold like subplots from rotten episodes of One Tree Hill, but the campiness of it all detracts from any sort of emotional takeaway the film could ever try to emulate within its audience – whatever that audience Reeder may have set out to sway. Each character faces some sort of obstacle, whether that be financial, social, or emotional, but the dialogue is so minimal, vague, and stylized, that there is no hope of a deeper meaning beneath this surface. The casual teenage outings have hints of unhinged surrealism, but the diegesis of the film doesn’t capitulate on these eccentricities to elevate into a new truth.
Being part-musical, the film also has few choral interludes, in hypnotic covers of popular songs that pervade montages of each character’s life. A slowed-down cover of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” pervades much of the film, as a hymn chock-full of feminist undertones. Once-fun anthems become much darker funeral processions in some of the movie’s most creative sequences, revealing the darker lyricism behind these tunes and igniting the pathos that it invokes when combined with the film’s overall approach. Yet, much like the façade that gives these suburban houses their pristine look, these creative sequences and the film’s flashy use of neon lighting can’t conceal the lack of a bubbling plot and the lack of any catharsis from this film’s perceived slow burn. Without a real resolution, it’s impossible to pin a meaningful genre to this film, and any emotional progress feels like wasted time. Jennifer Reeder’s creativity warrants applause, and her film ultimately distinguishes itself from others of this experimental ilk, but it fails to uncover a deeper meaning that isn’t bogged down by convolution. Like the reverberations felt by this town’s community after this film’s inciting incident, Knives and Skin will surely ring inside of cinemagoers like a bell, but maybe not for all of the reasons Jennifer Reeder intended.