What do all serial killers have in common? All serial killers have to be partly insane, which is exactly what the character KatieBird (Helene Udy) and the movie KatieBird are. The movie tells the story of KatieBird and how she grows up to be a serial killer. KatieBird tells her story to Dr. Richardson (Todd Gordon), who has no choice but to listen since she’s tied him up in chains. As a little girl (played by Nicole Jarvis), she is wrought with curiosity about her dad’s (Lee Perkins) dealings inside the family barn. As a teenager (played by Taylor M. Dooley), her dad brings her into his world of gruesome murder. As an adult, she’s already mastered her dad’s methods of murder and applies them on a regular basis.
Written and directed by Justin Paul Ritter, he seems to be a huge fan of Woody Allen’s Annie Hall because of his use of the split screen. From the start of the film, Ritter depicts KatieBird as insane from the start. Using the split screen, we are shown her distorted and schizophrenic view of the world. In one sense, her dad is always in the mind, telling her what to do. She’s lost her own sense of reality and can only see the world through his eyes, which is conveyed through the aspect ratio’s frequent reconfiguring on screen. It’s never a full screen, which gives you a sense of her isolation caused by her insanity.
As an experimental film, Ritter’s direction works because he wants us to see the world as KatieBird does. The problem is that his direction is all we get to help us see the world through her. The film uses the suspense trick of never showing the violence directly, almost always depicted in reaction and never explicit. This makes sense, but for a film that plays on its gruesomeness it never is totally gruesome. I realize that KatieBird is a super low-budget movie and special effects like stabbing and such are expensive to do, but the effect of a killer torturing and murdering his victim is subdued when you don’t actually show it. There is a scene where KatieBird kills her victim in the worst possible way, although infection and blood loss should have affected him a lot more quickly.
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