The Perfection twists itself into knots to a surprisingly enjoyable weirdness

Netflix

The Perfection is a straight-to-Netflix movie among the group of rom-com, odd thriller, crime, and terrible comedy crop over the last few years. The movie comes from director Richard Shepard, who directed the 2013 movie Dom Hemingway and quite a few episodes of Girls. Perhaps that is how he connected with Allison Williams, who here plays Charlotte Willmore, a cellist of no small talent and minor fame who left her musical training to tend to her terminally ill mother.

Years later, she contacts her old teacher Anton (Steven Weber, never more unctuous and off-putting) to reconnect and gets an invite to Shanghai where they are training. There she meets the new phenom Lizzie (Logan Browning of Dear White People, the Netflix spinoff), who is supremely talented but is besotted with Charlotte, her teen idol. So the movie starts to seem in the direction of an old school erotic thriller, although the actual sex scenes aren’t really particularly exploitative. The exploitative elements actually come later.

Because then the movie shifts to insane, violent twists and turns, with several ‘rewinds’ as we see what ‘really happened’ to explain a character’s behavior. Some of these twists and turns are a little … much, and some are pretty disturbing. But it all moves toward an elaborate, violent revenge fantasy that delights in the beauty of these actresses contrasted against harsh, clear imagery of monstrous actions and stigmatic exaggeration (not including actual religious imagery).

I think the best example of a thriller that does the rewind twist to show what really happened was Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, both the book and the movie, which stuck itself in specific point-of-view characters and switched narrative styles with the voice over narration to set up expectations and shatter them. In that one, all the twists and turns merely felt character driven instead of ‘ah ha, but you see this whole time Bob was the actual Godzilla the whole time.’

So unfortunately The Perfection dips into this well a few too many times, with a saggy middle set of scenes with a lot of expectations of different characters being abnormally good actors. The funny thing is that a lot of the acting from these three characters is actually very good, with Allison Williams standing out in parts empathetic and chilling. I can’t really explain the complete set of issues without spoiling the movie, but some twists felt better integrated than others.

At times the movie has a bland visual quality, but there are better times when it gets more into horror style imagery, including some impressive visual effects. Ultimately this is the sort of movie that is not ‘fun’ to watch in the traditional sense, but its absurd set of plot twists changes it and elevates it to a sort of camp modern pseudo-classic.

Once accepted as a ridiculous story and movie, the melodrama becomes fun and the exploitation becomes striking. You simply need to separate the possible intention from the execution, which thankfully moves well in the final act and keeps your interest even as it often tries your patience.

The Perfectionist has a run time of 1 hour 30 minute and is rated TV-MA.