“I knew the second we lined up the shot that it was gorgeous,” says Shepard. We see Charlotte backlit by an almost Byzantine halo of gold light before cutting to the movie’s most succinctly powerful image: a woman’s feet in Jimmy Choo heels, locked to the floor with gold chains and surrounded by the drape of a lush red gown. It’s also where Anton and his lackeys administer their most terrible punishments. The final act of The Perfection opens on Charlotte in Anton’s most sacred space, the Chapel, which we know from earlier in the film is where precious few students have the honor of performing. To unpack The Perfection’s go-for-broke ending, Vulture spoke with its director and stars about the confetti canon of kink, depravity, and cultural commentary in its closing scenes. At his family-run Bachoff Academy of Music, that means a generations-long “tradition” of systematic child rape. As the arbiter of perfection - and therefore a kind of self-styled holy surrogate - it’s Anton’s prerogative, and even duty, to break his students down so completely that their survival depends on his satisfaction. To reach “the perfection” in performance, he explains in a flashback scene, is to become closer to God. Through whatever means necessary, she set out to separate Lizzie from Anton and bring a reckoning upon him for sexually abusing her and every other elite student who had come under his care. With Charlotte finally back in the conservatory for the first time in a decade, the audience is at last let in on her game. The film’s biggest reveal, that Anton is a pedophile and a sociopath, flings viewers into the finale stretch of the story. But the true wonder of The Perfection comes at the end. The movie’s first hour is packed with wild body horror, an erotic cello duet, and multiple Funny Games–esque twists that will leave you gobsmacked.
She and Lizzie begin as rivals but quickly become lovers and then adversaries, then allies in a quest for revenge. Charlotte is clearly running a game, but we don’t know why. A once-elite cellist named Charlotte (Allison Williams) emerges after a decade of caring for her dying mother to reconnect with her old instructor, Anton (Steven Weber), at which point she meets the prodigy who succeeded her, the beguiling Lizzie (Logan Browning). The Perfection, in all its disturbed and thrilling and titillating glory, is an amalgamation of those interests - Shepard’s shot at The Handmaiden, but with a dirty syringe of American genre sensibility injected straight into the mainline.įrom 30,000 feet, the plot is simple(ish). Shepard has most famously directed numerous episodes of Girls, including the highlights “American Bitch” and “The Panic in Central Park,” both of which feel like vignettes that devolve into nightmares and feature women pushing back against toxic men. There are the exquisitely executed South Korean revenge films (particularly the domestically disturbed offerings of Park Chan-wook), and the high-class pulp of early Brian De Palma, all stitched together with motifs of his own work. There are the grindhouse movies he grew up watching on 42nd Street in New York City, where he soaked in every reel he could get in front of. To watch The Perfection, which made its debut today on Netflix, is to see a quilt of co-writer and director Richard Shepard’s influences.
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