'The Perfection' review — Cello from the other side

The Perfection follows two students of a renowned music academy whose first encounter leads to sinister results.

30-second review: The Perfection‘s first half portends a sharp and tense psychological thriller with two committed performances by Allison Williams and Logan Browning as the former and current star students of a prestigious music academy respectively. But one poorly executed twist followed by another takes away any goodwill the movie builds in its genuinely well-constructed setup.

While the rest of the movie could be an entertaining and campy descent into madness, its reliance on several plot and character reversal makes it more tiring than enjoyable. It's unfortunate because there's some real craft on display and the two leads give committed performances.

Where to watch The Perfection: Now streaming on Netflix.

Full review below ?

The best psychological thrillers make you want more and then don't give it to you — at least until they earn it and you're begging for it. Look at Karyn Kusama's masterful The Invitation, which spends almost its entire running time subtly changing your perception of its true nature before letting you have it.

And The Perfection does that for a time — but then it continues. The first 45 minutes are a campy descent into chaos as a former child prodigy Charlotte Willmore (Allison Williams) reunites with her mentor Anton Bachoff (Steven Weber) in Shanghai to help him pick his next star pupil.

Years earlier, Charlotte was that star pupil before being forced to drop out of the Bachoff Academy of Music — where she was studying cello — to care for her ailing mother. With her mother now passed, she's looking to be back in the fold. In Shanghai, where three young girls are in the final round of the competition, Charlotte meets Bachoff's current star Lizzie (Logan Browning).

Lizzie has fame, fortune, and even a giant billboard where she's endorsing vodka — because that's what cellists do — and Charlotte isn't quiet about her adoration for her. However, in a subversion of expectations, Lizzie is just as much a fan of Charlotte — she even flirts with her as they judge the competition.

Logan Browning and Allison Williams in *The Perfection*. Credit: Netflix.

The pair, at the behest of Anton, play a duet together shot and cut with the same attraction and intensity the pair seem to share. As the duet crescendos — both Browning and Williams learned how to play the cello for the movie — scenes of the pair drinking and dancing are cut in before they sleep together in a drunken haze. The next morning, they're all smiles. Although, Lizzie has a bad hangover that Charlotte suggests clearing it with ibuprofen and hair of the dog.

Lizzie invites Charlotte on her off-the-beaten-path journey into the rural western part of the country — she accepts. However, after boarding the bus, Lizzie's sickness turns from a bad hangover to something worse. Is it the mysterious stomach flu that has been going around? Was she poisoned? Was she cursed? Truthfully, the movie had me gripped.

The scenes aboard the bus are filled with tension as Lizzie becomes violently ill and desperate for reprieve. Director Richard Shepard does a terrific job of masking the true intentions of the characters and makes the scenes as disorienting as Lizzie feels. Williams and, in particular, Browning are terrific and incredibly believable as two young women feeling alone and terrified in a foreign country without access to any help. And then all that tension is deflated in one decision.

The movie literally rewinds itself and replays to fill in the gaps. The places where you were left guessing now leave no room for interpretation and the second half continues this trend. As the twists and turns get even more egregious the movie just becomes a chore to watch. It's unfortunate because the final beat is actually chilling and portends what could have been. A lighter touch would have been welcome.

As Sheila O'Malley pointed out in her review, The Perfection brings up an interesting conversation about spoilers — and also that this movie should have a strong trigger warning for sexual abuse and rape. For me, I think that you should be able to review and recommend — or not recommend — a movie without having to reveal any spoilers. However, when a movie, like The Perfection, relies too heavily on its twists and turns that you can't properly critique it, then it's probably not a good movie.

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Hey! I'm Karl. You can find me on Twitter here. I'm also a Tomatometer-approved critic.

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Karl Delossantos

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Hey, I'm Karl, founder and film critic at Smash Cut. I started Smash Cut in 2014 to share my love of movies and give a perspective I haven't yet seen represented. I'm also an editor at The New York Times, a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, and a member of the Online Film Critics Society.