In the Flesh: The Perfection

The Perfection is an odd one for me. To start, it has multiple glaring flaws. The lighting is intermittently terrible, washed-out and lifeless. The dialog sometimes veers too deep into corny therapy-lite dreck. The “rewind” effect used to pull us through the ever-changing plot is hacky and drawn-out, and the film is unsubtle in borrowing heavily from The Handmaiden, but in spite of these shortcomings the resultant whole is one of the most propulsively exciting and erotically charged thrillers I’ve seen in years. The chemistry between former child cello prodigy Charlotte (Allison Williams) and her replacement at the prestigious Bachoff Academy, Lizzie Wells (Logan Browning) alone fairly blisters the screen. The sequence in which they hook up for the first time is one of the most exquisitely cut in recent memory, a piece of clockwork the technical perfection of which only serves to heighten the breathlessly naturalistic sexual connection it frames. An earlier flirtation leading to said hookup begins the movie’s deeply horny love affair with closeup shots of mouths. Wet tongues. Slick teeth. Secrets whispered by lips nearly pressed to ears.

The twists which animate so much of The Perfection are best left to the viewer to experience, but suffice it to say that there are moments the film might have plausibly veered into full-on supernatural horror or a handful of other equally bizarre genres. What it does instead is so much richer and more interesting, a story about obsessive pursuit of self-destructive dreams, about the excuses we formulate in order to justify torturing people weaker than ourselves, about technical perfection and desire and identity and body horror as a means of self-discovery. Steven Weber as the calmly odious music instructor Anton Bachoff ties the whole thing together, anchoring high-flying themes and the meat of the film’s relationships to something concretely repulsive not just beneath its polite facade, but because of it.

That passionately genteel NPR affect, the matter-of-fact horror of his naked body, the final image of his beloved fetishistic “perfection” recreated out of the literal shattered pieces of the women he tried to destroy — there is a powerful resonance with the way American culture cultivates and consumes the talent of young women. All The Perfection’s nonsense and shaky visuals and scripting seem to fall away in the face of this cruelly cutting thesis and its astonishing leads. It’s a thriller of rare quality, a real white-knuckle nightmare that could go anywhere and often does, feinting and flitting down bizarre side roads which as often as not prove to hide the true nature of its deliciously twisty story. It’s an oddity, a truly great movie plagued by all sorts of professional inadequacies but still vitally white-hot and enthralling.