The Perfection took a huge leap directly to the bottom of my 2019 film rankings. Allison Williams and Logan Browning are great but the script was not.

I honestly don’t know where to start. I want to say that the only thing I didn’t hate was the performances by the lead actresses. The Perfection let me know it was going to require work for me to get into very early on and then took a nosedive off a cliff from there.

The Perfection does a lot of things poorly but the reason it is my worst movie of 2019 so far is because it is impossible to make sense of, on purpose! We’ll get into that more a bit further on but this movie wanted to be Gone Girl but didn’t want to provide the proper setup to make its twists actually make sense. Yes, twists, plural. I was even willing to accept the first one but when the second one hits I just had to roll my eyes and accept the L I earned by watching it. I’m getting way ahead of myself.

Elevator Review

Don’t waste your time on this movie unless you just want to see pretty women be crazy in ways that don’t make sense.

What’s it about?

Allison Williams (Get Out) is Charlotte, a cello prodigy who had to give up her spot at a prestigious school for gifted young girls so she could take care of her mother. After her mother passes she tries to get in touch with the people who run the school to resurrect her career. When she catches up to them she meets Logan Browning’s (Dear White People) Lizzie, the girl who replaced her. Of course, there is some natural jealously but the two seem to hit it off otherwise. That is until things go horribly wrong when they wander off together into the mountains of China in a scene that ends horribly for Lizzie.

Up to this point the movie is fine but it falls apart from there.

What went wrong?

I usually try to avoid spoilers in my reviews but since this one is so bad I don’t really care as much. Up to this point we have been teased with the idea of some weird outbreak happening in Southern China. We see a man get sick just before our girls go on their adventure. On the way out to the mountains Lizzie starts feeling sick and we can see where this is headed. Once we get to the scene in the trailer where Charlotte pulls out the meet cleaver, the movie rewinds to show us how Lizzie really got sick before bringing us back to the present.

Ok, whatever. It doesn’t completely add up but you can get why Charlotte did what she did. As we mentioned, she was jealous. That’s whatever. From there, Lizzie goes back to the cello school and is quickly dismissed now that she can’t do what made them like her in the first place. Her natural response is to go back at Charlotte and this all tracks. However, Lizzie’s next decision does not make sense and you spend the next 20 minutes confused as to why this would be happening before they do another rewind. They show you why the last 20 minutes happened but by then I had already checked out. The huge “reveal” was something I had already picked up on in the first 10 minutes of the movie so that didn’t help this rewind in pulling me back in. Finally, they closed the last 10-15 minutes with a bloodfest that ends with a beautiful, but crazy scene.

Overall

Look, I can see why some people might like this movie. It has some great cinematography, Allison and Logan are great actresses, and some people like crazy movies. However for me the predictable underlying story and the nonsensical way we got around to exposing it were just a horrible combination. At least Velvet Buzzsaw waited until the end to completely lose me.

I don’t even have the energy to read back over this review to make sure I made sense. My prediction is that this movie will have a very high critic rating and a very low rating from the average viewer.

-Bibs

PS: I just checked RT and see that the very high critic rating is correct so far (84%) but there aren’t enough regular people ratings to come up with a number.