The Perfection

Netflix's new film The Perfection was produced and released by Miramax pictures, a studio co-founded by the infamous scumbag Harvey Weinstein. I hope someday he watches this film all alone in his house in the hills and it makes him shudder. Then I hope he........no, watch the film instead. See how it all ends up. It would be great if life imitated art this time around.

Charlotte (Allison Williams) was a cellist with an otherworldly gift for her instrument until a family illness forced her to give it all up. Years later she gets a chance to return the the world she once thrived in and finds out that another woman, Lizzie (Logan Browning), has taken her place in the eyes of her teacher Anton. Charlotte and Lizzie, nonetheless become fast friends and the aftermath of a heavy night out changes everything for both of them forever.

Whoa, Sometimes you go into a film expecting one thing and what you get is so radically different that it leaves you rattled. I walked into this one expecting 90 minutes of backstabbing and musical rivalry but ended up with a mish mash of amputation, bugs, terrible tradition, vomit, graphic gore, male privilege and how it ruins lives, bus rides from hell and enough darkness to block out any amount of May sunlight. It's a film best watched cold but jesus there's stuff in here that would trigger the strongest of minds. It's like the love child of Park Chan-Wook and Brian De Palma with a healthy dose of Pascal Laugier lobbed in to mix things up. It's warped and it's genuinely unpleasant in places, but I gotta say I enjoyed it. No, scratch that, enjoyed isn't a word I could use here. It grabbed me and wouldn't let go.

It feels like a film where the hideous final shot was the first thing envisioned and the rest of the story was reverse engineered from there. Revelations pile on top of revelations. Events are rewound and watched from different angles. Double crosses become triple crosses. Events are vague before becoming glaringly obvious. Moments of maddening stupidity untangle to make some kind of sense..........sense. Ya, sense. TBH, if you start to think too much about The Perfection it does rapidly fall apart. Big, horrible things happen to people that don't really need to happen. In the real world people do this thing called talking. It works sometimes. It helps us avoid drugs and very sharp implements. But it's not very cinematic I suppose. And really, if they characters here were able to talk, us, the viewers would miss out on a lot of madness. Silliness is easy to forgive when you're staring at a TV screen with your jaw on the floor.

Allison Williams played Marnie Michaels for 6 years on HBO's hit series 'Girls'. There were 62 episodes and during each of them you wanted her to be hit by a flaming truck but here she untaps a hidden reservoir of sympathy that only becomes clear as the film progresses and you start to fear for her. She's pretty great in the part and displays a depth of talent that her big roles in Girls and Get On never hinted at. Logan Browning as Lizzie gets the less showy role but her big bus bound moment is the kind of thing that would put the fear of god in you, especially if you're prone to a spot of intestinal bother. They work well together, crazy chemistry at first before it all turns into something totally different.

The Perfection is a film about sticking together. It's a film tearing apart old traditions.  It's a film that's going to gain a large cult following over the next few years. Even if you don't like it (and many won't) it's an interesting and timely watch.