Jennifer Reeder is an American artist, filmmaker, and screenwriter. Her short film A Million Miles Away was nominated for a Tiger Award for Short Films at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and screened at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival in the U.S. Short Narrative Films category.
In 2003, she had a solo screening at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. She received a Rockefeller Grant for New Media in 2002 and a Creative Capital grant in 2015 to support the production of her first experimental feature-length film, As With Knives and Skin.
I watched both A Million Miles Away and Knives and Skin last night. I enjoyed both immensely. It was easy to see why A Million Miles Away was such a success. While it wasn't my favorite of the two, I liked that it held the bones of what would become Knives and Skin. That, along with Reeder's unique voice, kept me interested throughout and ultimately made me a fan by the end of the night.
While I am probably "a million miles away" from the target demographic for Reeder's work, I couldn't help but love the worlds she designed. Both films were weird and uncomfortable while still exhibiting tons of beauty. If you're looking for somewhere to start, do like I did and start with the short, but if you're looking to disappear, like Carolyn Harper, into a more complex David Lynch-like tale, go ahead and slice into Knives and Skin.
Part suburban nightmare, part neon-soaked teenage fever dream, this tantalizing mystery traces the wave of fear and distrust that spreads across a small Midwestern town in the wake of a high school girl’s mysterious disappearance. As the loneliness and darkness lurking beneath the veneer of everyday life gradually comes to light, a collective awakening seems to overcome the town’s teenage girls—gathering in force until it can no longer be contained. Unfolding in a hallucinatory haze of lushly surreal images, Knives and Skin is a one-of-a-kind coming-of-age noir that haunts like a half-remembered dream.
IFC Midnight will release the horror/mystery/thriller, Knives and Skin in theaters and available on VOD and Digital HD on December 6, 2019.
Jessie Hobson