Two Cents is an original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team will program films and contribute our best, most insightful, or most creative thoughts on each film using a maximum of 200 words each. Guest writers and fan comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future entries to the column. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion.
The Pick
Some movies arrive and immediately become legendary.
When The Perfection premiered at last year’s Fantastic Fest, audiences stumbled out raving. No one wanted to spoil the twists and turns of the new thriller starring Allison Williams and Logan Browning, but everyone seemed to agree that it was something you had to see to believe.
When The Perfection debuted on Netflix last week, the film was instantly a conversation starter. Some were enraptured by the film’s blend of tones, genre, and the melding of high class music and at times grisly violence. Others rejected it on sight.
The Perfection stars Williams as Charlotte, a once-promising young musician who gave up her spot in a prestigious music school run by Anton (Steven Weber) and Paloma (Alaina Huffman) to care for her ailing mother. A decade later, Charlotte’s mother finally passes away and she reaches out to Anton and Paloma, hoping to reconnect. The duo invite her to join them for an event in Shanghai spotlighting their new star pupil, Lizzie (Browning). The connection between Charlotte and Lizzie is immediate, and it’s not long before they’ve tumbled into bed together, and Lizzie invites Charlotte to accompany her on a backpacking trip through China.
And that’s when…
Well…
That would be telling.
Join us as we try to make sense of the music and madness that have made audiences gasp, groan, and cheer, all wrapped up in a peculiar cocktail known as The Perfection. — Brendan
(Depending on your spoiler threshold, both the capsule reviews and trailer below might reveal more about The Perfection than you would like if you want to be completely unspoiled as to the film’s nature)
Next Week’s Pick:
We cover a lot of variety of films here at Two Cents, or at least that’s the goal: sharing and discovery. As much as we enjoy current tie-ins, big blockbusters, and new releases, our favorite thing to do is share obscure, deserving oddities that we love. Tokyo Mighty Guy is one such pick for me. This imminently watchable 1960 musical comedy is fueled by the immense charm of protagonist Jiro, who coolly deflects and ingratiates gangsters and politicians alike with his intelligence and friendly swagger — or occasionally his fists — as he and his pals enter into adulthood and navigate the bizarre social strata of Ginza. It’s a lovable little movie and I really hope our readers will give it a shot. It’s streaming now on Amazon Prime. — Austin
Would you like to be a guest in next week’s Two Cents column? Simply watch and send your under-200-word review to twocents(at)cinapse.co anytime before midnight on Thursday!
Our Guests
Chris Chipman:
I knew nothing about The Perfection prior to seeing it. The title of the film popped up a lot on my Twitter feed and people’s reactions were incredibly vague but in the “OMG YOU HAVE TO SEE THIS THING” vein so I figured I would give it a shot. The first thing I was struck by was that its tone, cinematography, performances and score had something off and unnerving about them. Not in a bad way mind you, just in a way that immediately put me off balance.
As we move deeper into the story, brilliantly placed jump cuts to characters freaking out or some other sort of unnerving imagery start setting the tone that “something else” is going on, however the movie is quite clever and deliberate in knowing what you may think is going to happen and then taking crazy left hand turns into different genres, different tones, different settings all to continue to keep you off guard and in a state of unease.
If I had to classify a genre I would say The Perfection is an erotic, psychological, revenge thriller, body horror, religious horror, gore flick and full-on exploitation film rolled into one. It is far more subtle and straightforward in its eventual narrative, but I found many correlations to the recent Mandy starring Nicolas Cage, particularly in the way the heads of the music school acted and their motivations when their purpose in the story is eventually revealed. (@TheChippa)
Brendan Agnew (The Norman Nerd):
The Perfection is the kind of movie that seems to take the “That escalated quickly” as a personal challenge, to the point where you’ll likely find yourself chuckling at the obvious subtext of a cellist duet scene only for the sequence’s steamy subtext to immediately become text. At which point you might think “OK, we’re off to the races,” but the film is actually only getting started on its second line of cocaine while still inside the starting gate.
But is it a good movie?
…maybe? It’s more like 3 really good ideas for movies furiously duct taped together, with all the tact and subtlety of Sam Raimi doing a version of The Handmaiden– and 1980s Raimi at that- so it winds up less Fingersmith and more Wild Things. There are music and directing flourishes that are absolutely too good for the film they’re in (but still in a good way?), and there’s enough acting muscle ranging between wounded sincerity and absolute mania from both Allison Williams and Logan Browning to fuel this thing. But the downside is that the primary relationship dynamic feels absolutely genuine while also shortchanged. That said, I can’t help but admire the roller-coaster pacing and brazen, feverish turns this film stacks on top of one another.
Perfection it definitely ain’t, but I quite enjoyed this particular kick to the head.(@BLCAgnew)
Adrianna Gober:
Based on trailers and early reviews, The Perfection seemed to promise a good, sleazy thriller with a heaping helping of camp. An attempt was certainly made to deliver, but unfortunately, The Perfection falters in its execution. There’s a lot of clumsy over-explanation (so much of the dialogue in this film is expository, and only Haneke can get away with that corny rewind gimmick in the middle of a thriller) and the tone of the film frequently veers into unintentionally comical territory, which undercuts the tension. The thing about Park Chan-wook and Brain De Palma, filmmakers whose work this movie is definitely cribbing, is that no matter how utterly ridiculous or lurid their plot twists get, they sell it with 100% commitment to the material, and this is where The Perfection stumbles the most. Shepard never fully settles on a tone, and far more egregiously, takes shortcuts to all of the grisly, horny weirdness, cheating us with twists and turns that feel slapdash and never quite earned. Ultimately, it’s a poor imitation of much better work. (@EADxBB)
The Team
They had me right up until the rape shit started.
For roughly its first half, The Perfection was exactly the twisty/twisted bit of fun I expected from the stunned reactions on social media. Both Williams and Browning are giving it the ol’ Maximum Effort, and while the plot definitely has the feel of ‘Baby’s First de Palma’, that kind of film is rare enough that I was content to kick back and enjoy a cheerfully sleazy bit of fun.
And. Then.
It’s not just that rape is used as a plot point to motivate certain characters and underline how evil other characters are. That would be…well, I wouldn’t have liked that either but maybe it could have worked. But what really galled me is the climatic scenes which uses the threat of rape against a child (Having fun yet?) as the loaded gun that the protagonist desperately tries to keep from going off. It’s fucking ugly, and the longer the scene played the angrier I got.
Maybe there’s a way to make this work, but Shepherd’s workmanlike direction keeps the film permanently grounded. Masters like de Palma and Park Chan-woook often seem punch-drunk on their own excess, and when their films are clicking, you’ll follow them down any back-road. Aside from really, really, really loving his split diopter shots, Shepherd never communicates either the passion or the horror of his story, making both soaring art and grotesque trauma muted and unengaging. As a result, both Williams and Browning feel stranded, projecting whatever their personality is supposed to be during a particular scene hard to back-rafters but never finding any kind of underlying emotional truth you could hold onto through all the film’s berserk pivots.
Go rent Grand Piano instead.(@TheTrueBrendanF)
Aptly named, The Perfection was a nearly perfect film for me. Someone asked me if it was basically Black Swan with cellos and my response was, “No, but yes, but no” and I stand by that. You see, it’s clearly its own thing, a unique film with a unique story and perspective. However, I certainly think that pairing could play very well together. It’s easily as sexy, creepy, and twisty — albeit, it’s not at all the same story.
At its core, this is a revenge story. However, it’s not always clear who deserves to seek vengeance and who deserves to receive vengeance. There are certainly villains here, but it’s not always easy to see who the heroes are… if there are any.
One of the least predictable films of the year for me, both in what the film itself turned out to be and in the twists and turns within the story. It’s a powerful story told in an extremely entertaining way. Easily a top 5 of 2019 thus far! (@thepaintedman)
More or less everything I’d heard about The Perfection, beginning with our own Fantastic Fest review by David Delgado, has had the same theme: watch it, it’s wild, go in blind. And for the most part that’s been our theme today, as I think our contributors inherently understand the value of the way that this film handles its escalation and revelation.
There’s a sense of ominous unease from the start, but it’s vague, unfocused. We know something’s going down, and the rest of the film is a crazy ride to discover just what that is.
As Brendan mentioned, there is — and I’ll be vague about this — a rape component to the story. I’m also sensitive to the use of rape as a storytelling crutch, and even more so to its depiction onscreen, but the way it’s handled here fits the specific story they’re telling (specifically, I don’t think the film would work without it).
As the film twists and turns you’re forced to continually reassess whether you’re still on its particular wavelength. I will say this much — the film ends on a ludicrously perfect shot which, at least for me,definitely answers that question with an emphatic “Oh, HELL yes!” (@VforVashaw)
Next week’s pick: