The Perfection 2018 Movie Review

『In the shadow of perfection, broken and scarred, two women find vengeance and solidarity in each other’s wounds』

🎥 Movie Overview

🎬 Title: The Perfection (2018)
🌍 Country: 🇺🇸 USA
🎞️ Genre: Psychological Horror Thriller / Horror / Queer Subtext
🗓️ Production & Release: Premiered at Fantastic Fest 2018, released on Netflix in 2019
⏳ Runtime: 83 minutes
📢 Director & Screenplay: Richard Shepard
📺 Platform: Netflix

👩‍💼 Cast: Allison Williams – Charlotte Willmore
Logan Browning – Elizabeth "Lizzie" Wells

🧩 Story Deep Dive (Spoilers)

🎻 Talent, Abuse, and the Shackles of ‘Perfection’

Charlotte, a gifted cellist, was forced to leave the prestigious Bachoff Academy to care for her terminally ill mother. After her mother’s death, she returns to the music world at the invitation of Anton, the head of Bachoff. There she befriends Lizzie, Anton’s star pupil and Charlotte’s successor. The two share a night of intimacy and emotional connection, but their relationship soon takes a terrifying and unexpected turn of betrayal.

🩸 Madness, Betrayal, and a Deadly Choice

While traveling in rural China, Lizzie suffers from severe hallucinations and unbearable pain after Charlotte secretly gives her an overdose of ibuprofen. In her hallucinations, she feels insects crawling out of her body. Driven to desperation, Lizzie uses a butcher’s knife—handed to her by Charlotte—to amputate her own right arm. This shocking incident reveals Charlotte’s manipulation using her mother’s medications, and the real reason she drove Lizzie to self-mutilation begins to emerge.

🔥 Revelation, Revenge, and the Birth of Solidarity

Later, Lizzie returns to Bachoff without her arm, only to be cruelly expelled by Anton and his wife Paloma. Reuniting with Charlotte, Lizzie first reacts with rage, but soon both women decide to take revenge against Anton and the abusive system he represents. Charlotte confesses that she too was a victim of Anton’s years of sexual abuse and torture, and explains that forcing Lizzie to cut off her arm was her extreme way of saving her from the oppressive shackles of “perfection.”

🎼 From Destruction to a Healing Performance

In the final scene, Charlotte and Lizzie play music together—a powerful symbol of new solidarity beyond their suffering. No longer bound by others’ standards of “perfection,” they embrace each other’s flaws and absences, and reclaim their voices as true subjects of their music and lives.

🦋 Emotional Resonance and Thematic Meaning

🔪 The Violence of ‘Perfection’ as Metaphor

As its title suggests, The Perfection exposes the dark underbelly of the classical music world’s obsession with “perfection.”

• Art and Exploitation: The Bachoff Academy is depicted as a place that exploits young prodigies under the guise of achieving “perfect performance.” The struggles of the cellists symbolize not just artistic competition, but abuse masked as talent and success.
• A #MeToo Revenge Tale: At its core, the film portrays the sexual abuse and trauma inflicted by mentor Anton on female cellists. The bizarre and gruesome actions of Charlotte and Lizzie become an allegory for survivors uniting to reclaim power, framed through the lens of an extreme, #MeToo-inspired revenge narrative.

🎥 Storytelling Technique: ‘Rewind’ and Shifts in Perspective

The Perfection employs unconventional narrative devices to disorient the viewer.

• Unreliable Narrator: The film suddenly “rewinds” in the middle of events, revealing that what the audience had just witnessed was in fact driven by different motives and contexts.
• A Game with the Audience: This rewind device constantly upends expectations, forcing the audience to reconsider who is the victim and who is the perpetrator. While clever, the trickery is often overt and distracting.

🏳️‍🌈 Between Catharsis and Discomfort

• Excessive Shock Value: The use of body horror and gore (vomit, self-amputation, etc.) is deliberately provocative, but may feel gratuitous or upsetting for some viewers.
• Lack of Narrative Plausibility: As the plot progresses, the twists rely on increasingly implausible coincidences, leading critics to describe the story as campy. Charlotte’s revenge plan, in particular, hinges on unrealistic luck.
• Uneven Direction: Richard Shepard’s direction oscillates between effective shock sequences and confusion, caught between the kitsch of B-movie horror and the aesthetic of high-art thrillers.

The Perfection boldly fuses the elegance of classical music with the vulgarity of grindhouse horror, resulting in a film that sharply divides audiences. It tricks, disrupts, and unsettles viewers while offering a grotesque, bizarre catharsis for abused women reclaiming power. For those who enjoy unpredictable narratives that break genre conventions, intense female-led revenge tales, and visually shocking imagery, this film offers a truly provocative experience.

🎯 Personal Rating

💕 Love Scene Intensity: ♥♥♥♥
⭐ Rating: ★★