WARNING: REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS
Equally lazy as it is ridiculous,ย The Perfectionย becomes nonsensical in its second half, often reduced to unintentionally hilarious slashing, gore, and cheesy dialogue. Itโs fun to watch at times, but in all the wrong ways.
About halfway throughย The Perfection, Charlotte Willmore, talented cellist and musician, tells her lover and younger cellist peer Lizzie that she has to cut her hand off. Sat in the wilderness somewhere in China, Lizzie is handed a meat cleaver. She severes her hand from her arm and screams.
This scenario sounds ridiculously gruesome and scary, right? Ordinarily it would be, if it were in any other film, but this isย The Perfection. Thanks to some bizarre plot pacing and clumsy scriptwriting, this moment is so out-of-nowhere and unbelievable that itโs more just bizarre than traumatic.
Absurdity overshadowing intended horror is a prominent theme throughout this Netflix movie, which is plagued with sloppy character arcs and shoehorned feminist themes that do a disservice to their real-life inspirations. Only during the beginning moments ofย The Perfectionย can you take it seriously.
You may get some enjoyment out of this during a trashy movie night in, but for the most part this is a grating project with jarringly uneven pacing, one that uses the #MeToo movement half-heartedly for its own incentives.