The Perfection Is An Extravagant & Messy Thriller But Also A Brilliant One

SPOILERS FOLLOW BECAUSE IT IS THE ONLY WAY TO TALK ABOUT WHAT THE HECK THE PERFECTION IS AND HOW IT FARES IN BEING THAT

CW: Discussions of sexual assault ahead

What if Brian de Palma, The Handmaiden, hints of Chuck Jones and one of Carrie Underwood songs like Undo It or Before He Cheats all merged together? Well, whatever resulted from that mixture probably still wouldn’t be as bizarre as The Perfection, a movie that, as a whole, feels like two movies disjointedly shoved into one. It also proves to be a fascinating viewing experience that constantly surprised and outright impressed me with its ambition and how it explores pretty dark material in the second half of its story. The Perfection may be a messy affair but that's part of what makes it such a fascinating affair. There's nothing truly like The Perfection, for worse, yes, but also very much for the better. 

Though you won't be able to tell every story route The Perfection goes in its opening scenes, but those initial sequences do establish what kind of tone and ribald dialogue you can expect from the subsequent movie as Charlotte Willmore (Allison Williams) reunites with her former piano teacher Anton (Steven Weber) in Shanghai. Charlotte has been taking care of her grandmother for a decade, and with her grandmother having now passed away, she's able to watch Anton's new star pupil, Lizzie (Logan Browning) perform. Lizzie and Charlotte immediately connect on a romantic level as they exhcange sensual dialogue the entire evening and they proceed to spend the night together. After their romantic night, they then plan to spend the following day, which will see Lizzie traveling in a bus to a prestigious performing gig, together.

While on the trip, Lizzie begins to get gravely sick on the bus and this is where the weakest part of The Perfection comes into play. For full disclosure, I'm personally not a fan of the torture porn genre, which includes films like Hostel or Saw, and that's a genre I was reminded of during the extended sequences of Lizzie writhing in agony and vomiting maggots. In these sequences, The Perfection is basically just about watching an innocent human being suffering in extreme pain and it just doesn't work even as a shock value thriller, it just feels like the movie running one note into the ground over and over again. This portion of the movie is capped off with the predictable revelation that Charlotte is the one behind Lizzie's sickness, meaning all of that misery couldn't even deliver a fun unpredictable twist.

Aside from the delightful macabre sight of Allison Williams helpfully whipping out a meat cleaver in a manner reminiscent of Bugs Bunny, at this point, it seemed like The Perfection was just going through the grisly motions of being a more extreme version of classic "catfight" thrillers like Obsessed. But then the second half of the story begins after Lizzie chops her own arm off and The Perfection soon reveals that this movie is actually a subversion of those kinds of movies that pit women against each other. The Perfection very quickly makes it clear that its target is actually far darker and more ingrained in reality than one could have expected. As the third act reveals, Anton has sexually abused all of the young female pupils he teaches as a form of discipline that he justifies under relgious pretenses as well as being necessary for his pupils to achieve "the perfection".

This brilliant story turn suddenly makes so much of The Perfection click into place and the whole tale takes on a whole new meaning. Though The Perfection is frequently a trashy thriller involving arms being chopped off and lines of dialogue like "The bitch is in my trunk", it manages to actually approach the perspective of being a sexual assault survivor with surprising grace. Thankfully, The Perfection knows just when to pump the brakes on the frequently ludicrous acting and dialogue so that it can actually treat certain circumstances with actual menace and danger. Anton threatening a new young pupil to motivate Charlotte to perform for him, for instance, is thankfully depicted as something with actual heft instead of falling into the Family Guy trouble of mocking atrocities simply for the sake of being a misguided and tedious version of "edgy".

This plot turn also works because of how it dares to root its villains in reality. Anton feels like a character directly ripped from the headlines of the real-world where powerful men so often use their influence simply to assault women and/or mold women into a man's image with no regard for the woman's own autonomy. Much like Showgirls or I Tonya, The Perfection uses a heightened tone to properly realize the grotesque and over-the-top nature of real-world stigmas and dehumanizing experiences women go through. That tone is put to good use in an all-out gruesome finale that, among its many better qualities (including the smart decision to keep depictions of actual sexual assault off-screen) manages to simultaneously be both a heartwarming depiction of survivors of sexual assault finding unity and hope in one another as well as a depiction of women gruesomely taking down a male villain that echoes the climax of Death Proof in how cathartic it is.

It was such a head trip to see all the twisty roads The Perfection ended up going down, sans the mid-movie twist of who poisoned Lizzie, this puzzle box of a movie just kept upending my expectations in its second-half to fascinating effect. Granted, the first-half still feels like a case of Assassination Nation, where a film about subverting genre movie tropes related to women ends up indulging in some of those tropes itself, while the very necessary move of taking Charlotte's experiences as a sexual assault survivor seriously does have the adverse effect of making one contemplate the real-world repercussions of her behavior towards Lizzie that included drugging her and convincing her to chop her arm off. The Perfection is imperfect (oh what an original pun!) but I was constantly thoroughly engrossed in both its madness as an extravagant thriller and how it tackles more contemplative storytelling material with surprising success. Plus, it delivered the sight of Allison Williams helpfully whipping out a meat cleaver, that's gonna be a GIF before long I'm sure.