Genre: (will tell you in review)
Premise: (being intentionally vague) A former cellist prodigy visits China to visit and support her old teacher.
About: All the writers here have made their names in television. Writer-Director Richard Shepard worked with star Allison Williams on Girls, directing 12 episodes on that show. Nicole Snyder and Eric Charmelo are best known for writing on the series, Supernatural.
Writer: Richard Shepard and Nicole Snyder & Eric Charmelo
Details: 90 minutes
I’ll start by saying the only real way to enjoy this movie is to see it without knowing anything. If you know even the genre, it will affect your viewing experience. So before we get started, I would implore you to go watch The Perfection then come back here for the review. Let me repeat: The second I start talking about this movie, I’m spoiling it. So if you’re cool with that, join me for this wild bucking bronco of a ride.
One of the benefits of Netflix barreling onto the scene is the bass-ackwards release process they’ve injected into the system. For the past 25 years, movie releases have followed the same pattern. Drop a trailer six months beforehand to make the public aware of the film. Start building buzz about a month before release. Throw some billboards up in all the major cities. In the final two weeks, do an all out blitz with TV trailers, magazine interviews, and talk show appearances so that by the time the movie comes out, there isn’t a person on the planet who hasn’t heard of it.
Netflix employs, arguably, the exact opposite strategy. They don’t tell anybody about their movies. They just drop them on their service, promote them from within the Netflix OS, and if the movie does well, feature it more prominently and maybe do some post-release promotion. While I don’t purport to know how this model is successful, there is one major benefit to it. You can be surprised by movies again. Such is the case with The Perfection.
Charlotte is a cellist prodigy being molded by the great Anton, thought of as one of best teachers on the planet. But when Charlotte’s mother gets sick, she’s forced to take care of her for the next decade, destroying her music career. When Charlotte’s mother finally buys it, Charlotte heads to China to reconnect with Anton and meet his newest prodigy, Lizzie. Charlotte fangirls over Lizzie, who has become the most well-known cellist in history. She has her own giant billboard hanging over the city center.
It just so happens that Lizzie is a fan of Charlotte’s as well. When she was a little girl, she saw Charlotte play, and it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever heard. After waltzing around the glitzy concert post-party, the two see a man in a suit become uncontrollably sick, throwing up and falling over. There are rumors of a growing sickness in a nearby province. The girls are spooked but head home for a nightcap.
That night, the two end up in bed together, and Charlotte concedes that Lizzie is her first. Lizzie is smitten and invites Charlotte on tour. She’s trying something different, playing in remote Chinese provinces, which means some rough and tumble travel accommodations. But Charlotte is down. However, as soon as the two get on the bus, Lizzie starts feeling sick. As their bus heads into the mountains, she starts feeling really sick. And then Lizzie throws up, just like the man at the party. And when we see her vomit up close, it has live bugs in it.
Charlotte and Lizzie start screaming at the bus driver and passengers for help. But no one understands them. A man with limited English skills says they’re in the middle of nowhere. There’s nothing they can do. But Lizzie is going downhill fast. Her body is about to explode. Finally, the bus driver can’t handle it anymore and throws Lizzie and Charlotte out onto the road in the middle of nowhere then drives off.
Lizzie continues to spiral, scratching at her arms, until finally one opens up and bugs start crawling out. Charlotte comes to the rescue, pulling out a meat cleaver (where the f did she get that from??) and tells Lizzie she knows what she has to do. Lizzie grabs the cleaver and slams it down on the arm, chopping her hand off.
Freeze-frame.
Everything rewinds, back through the bus, to the streets, to the morning at the hotel, where we see Charlotte sneakily pull out some hardcore medication, stuff from when her mom was sick, the kind that if you take too much, you can hallucinate. And that’s when we put it all together. Charlotte planned this from the beginning. This is her rival. She was jealous. She wanted to take her out. So she pulled her in close then orchestrated the death blow.
Cut to months later. Charlotte is nowhere to be found. Lizzie is without a hand. Anton has kicked Lizzie out of the program. So Lizzie is determined to get her revenge. She eventually locates Charlotte, goes to her house, tazes her, and brings her back to Anton’s remote mansion. I’m going to speed things up here so this review doesn’t take until next Monday.
The short of it is Charlotte tells Anton that she did this not to hurt Lizzie, but to help her escape him. She knows that Anton is a monster, that he does horrible things to all of his girls, and that this was the only way to get Lizzie out of his grasp. At this point, we don’t know what’s going on, who’s telling the truth and who’s lying, but everything will be settled when Charlotte is asked to play an impossible piece perfectly. If she screws up, Anton’s latest prodigy will be initiated into the same horrible club that both Charlotte and Lizzie were.
The Perfection had a couple of great moments and was on its way to becoming an excellent movie. That bus ride scene was something else. I can’t remember the last time I was so tense watching a scene. You could feel this girl’s pain and fear and kudos to the writers and director for staying in that scene as long as they did. You have to identify when you’ve got a great moment and milk it for everything it’s worth. That bus scene alone was worth the price of admission. And yes, I know there’s a joke to be made about how admission for this movie was free.
I liked the use of the red herring. Red herrings have taken a back seat in recent years because in order to get you to come to a movie these days, studios have to show you everything beforehand. You’re not going to fall for a red herring if you’ve already seen a plot point that disproves it in the trailer. But when nobody’s even heard of your film, you can use red herrings to great effect. Here, we get this guy throwing up at the party and someone saying a deadly sickness is spreading through a nearby province. Remember, I don’t even know the logline is for this movie. So now I’m thinking, is this going be a zombie film? Or a Bird Box situation? I don’t know. But that’s where my head was at when Lizzie got sick on the bus. I thought for sure this was going to be an outbreak movie and these two were going to have to work together to survive. It was the perfect red herring because the movie goes off in a totally different direction.
I have to admit, the twist where she cuts off her hand and we find out Charlotte planned this all along – that shocked me. Not only did it shock me, but now I had NO idea where the movie was going to go. At this point, we’re only halfway through the film!
However, when we jumped forward it time, it became apparent that The Perfection had bitten off more than it could chew. Whenever there’s a big time jump in the middle of a script, I know the script is in trouble. How do I know this? Because it’s an indication that the story has painted itself so deep into a corner that there’s no way for the writer to get out of it in that moment. So they cheat by jumping forward in time. Indeed, when The Perfection conveniently jumps us several months out of the hand-chop scene without explaining what happened (they were in the middle of nowhere. how did they get out??), I figured some turbulent storytelling skies were ahead.
The Perfection then tries one of the most impossible moves in storytelling – the giant twist after the giant twist. It’s hard enough to come up with one good twist. Now you’re going to try and pull off another one? It’s like doing a triple-axel right after a triple-axel. This twist occurs when we learn that Lizzie is not working against Charlotte, but that they’re secretly working together. After Lizzie found Charlotte, Charlotte explained she had gotten Lizzie to cut off her own hand because that was the only way to get her away from Anton. Lizzie bought this excuse and the two were in cahoots from that point forward, determined to use the revenge as a smoke-screen to take Anton down.
I mean… come on. Do you realize how much you’re asking us to buy here? The person who deceived you, pretended to love you, and then got you to cut off your own hand… YOU’RE GOING TO TEAM UP WITH THAT PERSON????? I can imagine how that conversation went. It’s late. The three writers are behind on the script. They need to make some hard choices. Someone comes up with the idea – “Maybe they’re secretly working together,” and the next 30 minutes is the writers talking themselves into this being a good idea. Hey, I’ve been there. I know how these things happen.
I’m torn about The Perfection. The first half is so good, you’re shocked that it was relegated to such an invisible release. But the further on it goes, the more you see the writers thrashing around in the water as they realize they’re running out of time and the boat’s not coming back to save them. That being said, the most important quality in a film is that it entertains me. And while this film had all sorts of issues, I can’t deny that I was entertained. Even during that wacky nonsensical ending. If you want to take a trip to another universe, do shrooms while watching a double-feature of this and Serenity.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Everyone should watch the bus scene in The Perfection to learn how to write a great movie scene. The particulars of writing a scene like this are actually pretty straight-forward. Put your characters inside a situation that they can’t get out of and have something bad happen. Then keep making what happens worse and worse as the scene goes on. The bus scene is all about the world closing in on these characters. The walls of the bus closing in. The people in the bus fearing them. The bus driver getting mad. They’re in the middle of nowhere so there’s no help coming. It truly is a dire situation. That’s where you’re going to find a lot of great scenes.
