The Per­fec­tion

Ear­ly in The Per­fec­tion, one char­ac­ter admires her trav­el­ling companion’s ease with pur­chas­ing bus tick­ets for their tourist jaunt across Chi­na: ​“That would have tak­en me three hours,” she says, ​“and lots of man­ic hand ges­tures and then des­per­ate cry­ing and then prob­a­bly we would have end­ed up in South Korea.”

In the moment, that line is sim­ply self-dep­re­ca­tion about being an Amer­i­can abroad, but in ret­ro­spect it almost per­fect­ly describes the jour­ney the film takes. Des­per­ate cry­ing and man­ic hand ges­tures, some con­cerned with per­form­ing acts of vio­lence, are immi­nent for both par­ties. The film’s ven­ture to South Korea is only lit­er­al, though, in the sense that in tone, atmos­phere, sur­pris­ing gear shifts and con­tent, the film resem­bles some of the most beloved Kore­an genre movies of the past two decades more than any­thing con­tem­po­rary com­ing out of the USA, and one Kore­an film­mak­er in par­tic­u­lar. The Per­fec­tion feels more like Park Chan-wook mak­ing an Amer­i­can movie than Park’s actu­al Amer­i­can movie, Stok­er, did.

Where this dif­fers from Park – and to loop it back to that dia­logue quote again – is that The Per­fec­tion doesn’t verge on three hours (à la The Hand­maid­en), but is instead a tidy 90 min­utes, all while fit­ting in four dis­tinct chap­ters of esca­lat­ing, increas­ing­ly max­i­mal­ist may­hem. And part of the thrill is in the unpre­dictabil­i­ty of the jour­ney, so even the short trail­er Net­flix have put togeth­er is worth avoid­ing, although more for it giv­ing away visu­al punch­lines and loca­tions than plot. As an advi­so­ry warn­ing, how­ev­er, it should be men­tioned that themes of abuse and trau­ma fea­ture in the film’s sec­ond half in a man­ner that may prove divisive.

The film’s table-set­ting first 20 min­utes are fair game to dis­cuss with­out giv­ing away much. After ten years of car­ing for her ail­ing moth­er, trou­bled cel­lo prodi­gy Char­lotte (Alli­son Williams) itch­es to reach out to Anton (Steven Weber), the head of her for­mer pri­vate music acad­e­my, and Lizzie (Logan Brown­ing), the now adult star pupil who replaced her.

Ven­tur­ing to a pres­ti­gious audi­tion cer­e­mo­ny in Shang­hai, where three new young tal­ents com­pete for a top res­i­dence place at Anton’s school in Boston, Char­lotte forms an imme­di­ate bond with Lizzie, who she ends up per­form­ing, going danc­ing and hook­ing up with over the course of one night. That the viewer’s been wit­ness to brief flash­back moments imply­ing the pre­ced­ing decade has tak­en a heavy men­tal toll on Char­lotte sug­gests this seduc­tion may involve sin­is­ter motives.

Direc­tor Richard Shep­ard, also co-writer with Nicole Sny­der and Eric C Charme­lo, pep­pers split diopter shots through­out, lend­ing the aes­thet­ic the feel of a bla­tant Bri­an De Pal­ma trib­ute. It’s appro­pri­ate to the ini­tial impres­sion The Per­fec­tion might be some­thing like if De Pal­ma made Whiplash, before the con­tent goes the way of Park. If there’s any irri­tant in how Shep­ard ties up his loose ends, and no dis­re­spect meant to the per­fect­ly pitched per­for­mances of the cen­tral trio, it’s that it wouldn’t have suf­fered from bor­row­ing more of De Palma’s pen­chant for dia­logue-light sequences in explain­ing some of its lat­ter twists.