!!SPOILER WARNING: THIS REVIEW REVEALS MANY PLOT TWISTS!!

Richard Shepard’s twisty horror is as infuriating a film as it can get. It’s satisfyingly unpredictable with many unseeable twists and turns (take the spoiler warning very seriously!) that starts in slightly odd territory and just gets wilder from there. The sudden tonal shifts are admirable in a way but it’s never as effective as it should be and ends up irritating as much as it impresses.

(One last spoiler warning!) Talented cellist, Charlotte Willmore (Allison Williams) abandoned her studies at the exclusive family-run Bachoff music school in Boston to care for her terminally ill mother. A decade later, having spent time in a psychiatric hospital, she tracks down the school’s owners Anton (Steven Weber) and his wife Paloma (Alaina Huffman) who are in Shanghai searching for new talent. At a recital she meets their new star pupil, Lizzie (Logan Browning) and the two begin a relationship. Lizzie wakes with a hangover and Charlotte gives her some ibuprofen (this isn’t as insignificant as it seems, it later turns out) before they set off on a bus trip into the Chinese countryside. Lizzie becomes increasingly ill and starts vomiting up maggots and they are thrown off the bus and left stranded in a remote area. Lizzie believes that bugs are crawling under the skin on her arm and uses a cleaver that Charlotte is carrying with her to hack off her hand.

The film then reverses, and it turns out that Charlotte drugged Lizzie with her late mother’s medication, causing her to hallucinate. The mutilated Lizzie turns up at Anton and Paloma’s home in Boston where they are grooming new pupil Zhang Li (Eileen Tian), convinced that Charlotte maimed her out of professional jealousy, leaving her unable to play again. She’s rejected by the couple and leaves, traveling to Minneapolis where she attacks kidnaps Charlotte, taking her back to the Bachoff school. There Charlotte reveals that she drove Lizzie to harm herself to save her from Anton and Paloma who, along with the rest of the staff at the school, have been systematically sexually abusing their young pupils (“I’m no random pervert,” an indignant Anton tells them, “just having a little fun”). Another rewind reveals that Catherine and Lizzie are in fact working in cahoots and are preparing to take their bloody revenge on their tormentors.

The Perfection is certainly never boring though it never actually holds together all that well. It takes you on an intriguing journey though whether you end up going anywhere worth visiting is debatable.

The tricksiness of the plot seems to have baffled even writers Eric Charmelo, Richard Shepard, Nicole Snyder. In the opening scenes there’s talk of a viral outbreak in the south of China (strangely prophetic given the COVID-19 outbreak that spread around the world two years after the film was made) that causes people to cough up blood but once it’s been used by Charlotte to plant more paranoia in Lizzie’s head it’s completely forgotten about and never mentioned again.

The first “rewind” impresses because it’s unexpected and a clever way to impart previously concealed information. The second time it just feels pointlessly tricksy. Take them away and the story feels even more like the schlocky rape-and-revenge tale that it clearly is. It’s all dressed up in its best finery, thanks to Vanja Cernjul’s marvellous photography but at heart it’s just a variation on one of the most contentious of all exploitation film tropes.

The grandstanding of the camerawork and the plot machinations work well enough the first time around when you don’t know they’re coming but, on a repeat, viewing they feel as contrived as the plot. It all feels a little bit like cheating, the script deliberately withholding information that it delivers later thinking that it’s clever when really it’s not at all.

The performances are mostly good, especially Williams and Browning, which helps to paper over some of the narrative racks, though Steven Weber skates dangerously close to over-acting in almost every scene. The first twenty minutes, as the two women begin their relationship, is the strongest – once the body horror stuff kicks in, it starts to unravel.

There’s an irony that this post #MeToo horror was co-produced by Miramax whose former boss Harvey Weinstein and his catalogue of sexual abuses led to the movement in the first place. The film was shot before most of Weinstein’s crimes came to light (and long after Weinstein had left the company) so although it might be desirable to think of it as a redemptive film apologising for his depredations, that simply wouldn’t be true. Though it does feel like an allegory made by people who suspected the truth of what the mogul had been up to.

It’s an expertly made film but it never feels substantial and certainly isn’t as clever or original than one suspects everyone involved in it thought it was. It all leads to a wildly gory climax and takes its leave with a fantastically macabre final shot that almost redeems the nonsense we’ve sat through before it but it’s just a well-made faux exploitation film without the grit of the real thing.