Reviewed by Alicia Glass
When troubled musical prodigy Charlotte meets Elizabeth, the new star pupil of her former music school trainer Anton, the two embark on a horrific journey of discovery into their past, present, and future.
Oh, this one is absolutely astounding y’all. The hunt for perfection in any given art form is a grueling, overwhelming and often mentally damaging thing, and the chosen medium for The Perfection is the playing of the cello, admittedly a very difficult musical instrument to master, much less play with the kind of expertise Anton (Steven Weber) is demanding. Make sure all your fingers are accounted for, and lets dive into this!
So there really is no other way to say it – Charlotte (Allison Williams) is a very troubled woman. She studied and learned and played the cello in Anton’s school, where he adamantly drilled into her head about the perfection that he and his father and his grandfather were all chasing and how he expects the same out of his students, constantly. But then a family member became ill, Charlotte had to go take some time off to care for them, and in this way barely managed to escape Anton’s clutches. So it’s been awhile for Charlotte when she meets up with Anton, his new starlet Elizabeth or Lizzie (Logan Browning), and a new crop of hopeful students all doing competing performances to grab a spot for training in Anton’s school, here in Shanghai, China, of all places.
The competing girls are all very young, of Asian descent, and the most promising seems to be Zhang Li (Eileen Tian). But Charlotte mainly has eyes, and ears, for Lizzie, as both of them are invited here to be judges for the deciding performance, along with Anton and the rest. Neither of our starlets are what you would consider normal girls, but after the gossipy performance and sad judging, Charlotte and Lizzie go and do something quite normal together – go out drinking, dancing, and then back to a hotel for a night of lovemaking. Cool, right? In the morning Lizzie announces she’s about to take off for a well-deserved vacation, roughing it in the mountain wildernesses of Tongli mostly, and would she, Charlotte, like to come along? Hells yeah she would!
Except now, ever since Lizzie woke from her night of partying and girl-fun, she’s felt seriously, like badly, ill. Some very ill-advised food before getting onto the bus headed for Tongli later, and Lizzie is shrieking and sobbing, puking onto the closed-up windows, trying desperately not to sh*t herself, going through handfuls of supposedly-helpful pills and what seems like gallons of water. Charlotte is trying to comfort her, but her calm demeanor seems to only further goad Lizzie into hysterics. In fact, oddly, the only people Charlotte seems to take issue with are the superfluous folk who get in her way, like the shouting bus driver. And after both Charlotte and Lizzie are forced off the bus, and poor Lizzie endures another bout of insect-induced insanity and body-horror, an icily-calm Charlotte, like a wicked magician, produces out of nowhere a cleaver.
From here, the movie does a complete one-eighty, and literally everything you thought you knew up to this point turns out to be something else entirely. The reveal is absolutely brilliant, showcasing both the acting talents of Williams and Browning beautifully, and the movie uses this trick more than once, without making it seem tired, or a trope, or a trick. After the first reveal and the new knowledge of what’s really going on, we the audience are completely invested yo, and want very much to know what Charlotte, and Lizzie, are going to do next. That final confrontation with a less-than-repentant Anton is worth every last drop of blood they had to spill to get there.
See if you too could endure The Perfection, on Netflix now!