Why Netflix's batshit horror The Perfection doesn't make sense

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Get Out's Allison Williams and Dear White People's Logan Browning star in Netflix's B movie Black Swan about rival cellists. Yet somehow it doesn't quite work.

The main problem is a common one for ambitious horror flicks – it tackles dark, very serious themes in a superficial way.

Cast your minds back to 2008's Teeth, another film with an interesting subtext that was tonally all over the place.

Most people agree Teeth is a black comedy, a body horror twist on a coming of age drama. Yet the plot sees the heroine Dawn repeatedly raped by pretty much every man she meets.

2008's Teeth sees heroine Dawn repeatedly raped... yet it's still a black comedy?

True, these men do get their comuppence. Dawn fortunately has a toothed vagina, so it's soon raining severed dicks. But there's something horribly grim about watching repeated scenes of sexual abuse not taken very seriously.

The Perfection needs to treat its characters with more respect in order to get away with tackling such heavy themes

The Perfection has similar issues (and also severs body parts with childlike glee). Like Teeth you have to admire its audacity, both in themes and storytelling. And it has two terrific central performances, but Williams and Browning are tasked with playing contradictory characters whose actions make zero sense.

The film trades mainly in intense body horror gore (which we're in no way knocking) and sharp left turn plot twists. The first major twist is totally spoiled by the trailer. The second is just a bit stupid.


Its themes are similar to 2016's Neon Demon and 2011's Black Swan – it features women pushed to ridiculously high standards, jeapordising their mental stability for the sake of success. Like those films, The Perfection is a lurid melodrama. Sex, gore and amateur psychology are its bread and butter.

In The Perfection, Charlotte and Lizzie are rival cellists who go to alarming lengths to best each other

Unlike those films (potential spoiler here), The Perfection deals head-on with institutionalised rape by men in positions of power and influence. But this is treated as another gotcha plot twist. And (bizarrely) results in another gear shift as the movie becomes a camp slasher (no more spoilers now).

So to recap we have a plot which defies logic, a relationship between the two central characters that strains credability, and B movie treatment of serious themes which you're only half-willing to let the film get away with.


Horror movies are expected to tackle dark themes and make us uncomfortable. The Perfection does both of those things. A bus ride early in the movie where Lizzie (Browning) starts to become seriously ill is a gruelling watch. The gore in the film's climax is both wince-inducing and laughably OTT.

Yet there's still a jarring note, a feeling that The Perfection needs to treat its characters with more respect in order to get away with tackling such heavy themes. While the film is clearly having fun with its crazy extremes and twisty storytelling, it's trafficking in real instances of sexual abuse by powerful men that have real life consequences.


We're conscious that the Twittersphere is against us here – most people seem blown away by the sheer bravado of The Perfection and it's hard not to be swept up in the sheer nastiness of it all. But its blend of silliness and seriousness just doesn't cut it for us.

Do you love your Netflix horror? In that case, you're bound to be excited by the second series of The Haunting of Hill House, but here's why it sounds like a terrible idea from what we know so far.
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