10/16: The Perfection

Today should hopefully be the last day of catch up, but anyway, here goes:

10/16: Today's horror flick was The Perfection, another from the Netflix originals pile. The Perfection follows a once-elite cellist, Charlotte, who had to give up her career cello...ing, I guess? after her mother was struck ill. She left her elite cello school (which apparently is a thing, if this movie is to believed. It's like Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters except your super power is playing the cello really well. Laser eyes and controlling the weather is cool and all... BUT CELLOS GUYS) and finally returns ten years later after her mother has passed. In the meantime a younger prodigy, Lizzie, has taken her place. The two meet and strike up a romantic relationship, but... is there something more sinister under the surface?

Yeah, there is. Now you know. 

Do you ever watch a movie and wonder... how the hell did they think of this? Yeah, that's pretty much The Perfection in a nutshell. How was the director, Richard Shephard, just sitting around one day and thinking, "Ya know what I'd like to make? A movie about battling cellists. The new blood and the old. And there's gotta be bugs crawling under their skin and lost appendages. Yep. Oh! And what would tie the whole movie together? A cello pedophile cult! Ok, we're in business. I got me a movie. Let's get this thing greenlit." Like... how, though? 

If that train of thought Shephard must have had is any indication, this movie has more twists and turns than my bowels after Mexican food. 

I'm here all week.

These twists and turns are precisely what makes The Perfection good when it's really good and keeping you on your toes about the mystery. They are also what makes the movie insufferably bad and cliche at it's worst; the movie devolves into a convoluted but somehow still cliche mess in the last half hour. There's a big reveal that comes from so far out of left field that instead of surprising you it just makes you laugh at the absurdity. From there the movie slips into an awfully convenient scenario, complete with a bloody revenge scene set to gangster rap. How many damn times have we seen that before? Then the final scene, a completely ridiculous cherry on top (so ridiculous in fact that I made a joke about it happening just a few moments before it happened), that is so absurd to be laughable. Maybe it was intended, but even if so it completely undermines everything before it.

Honestly this movie started in such cool and different indie horror territory but then the kitchen sink got thrown in. The Perfection falls into the same pitfalls of so much horror: sometimes less is more. 

6.5/10