![]() ![]() I’ll admit that I was on the fence about this movie up until the last 10 minutes. But to paraphrase Steve Jobs, great art doesn’t follow public taste - it stretches it. No, I did not wake up this morning expecting to see a bony wrist inserted into a human vagina after having its hand chopped off. But every once in a while, a movie like “The Perfection” comes along to remind us that there’s a wide world of unexplored sexual terrain that’s waiting for anyone with the creativity (and supply of meat cleavers) to expand their horizons. So, at a certain point, it’s natural to assume that your days of discovering brand new sex acts are behind you. The human body has a finite number of orifices - and a finite number of limbs that can be inserted into those orifices. AF The Aftermath: Did I Just Watch Somebody Get Wristed? ![]() It’s a brutal reality of the entertainment landscape that more and more titles are going poof by the day - and an existential threat to cinema found on the fringes when “ Watch the lesbian cellist rape revenge conspiracy epic before it’s too late…” just feels like common sense. ( And they’re both directed by men! Parallels!) But the politically minded Netflix gore-fest and the Cate Blanchett-starring cancel culture portrait are both dread-inducing lesbian revenge sagas set in the cutthroat classical music world - each with spectacular endings serving as brutal punctuation on metaphors for social criticism - each with obvious Park Chan-wook influences. ![]() Yes, the two movies are ultimately worlds apart in tone and target audience. So it was a pleasant surprise when word-of-mouth proved enough to make “The Perfection” into a proper moment Williams’ red look from the film was briefly a top carousel mainstay on Netflix’s homepage.īut what has that virality done for “The Perfection” lately? It was with a heavy heart that I watched Todd Field’s “TÁR” come and go from the film conversation last year with next to no mention of this oddly similar work. Spoiler-wary critics ( myself included) were reticent to explain why a seemingly schlocky Netflix original knocking off Universal’s casting could actually be a cult classic in the making back in 2019. Far removed from the “Get Out” fervor that might’ve once propped it up, Shephard’s body horror can safely stand on its own as an uneven but gobsmacking delight - and you don’t need to be tricked into cuing it up. In reality, “The Perfection” is so much better, bolder, gayer, and grosser than that. Marketing for “The Perfection” positioned Williams’ perceived duplicity brilliantly in its new context: effectively inviting audiences they were confident would try the film anyway to misunderstand her complicated character as a full-stop bad guy in the movie’s promotion. Fresh off her Froot Loop-induced lunacy, the former “Girls” star was a newly minted scream queen, known for playing type-A villains with elaborately hidden motives. When “The Perfection” hit Netflix in 2019, there was no question that distributing Allison Williams’ first film since Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” was a decent play among subscribers. The streaming age is unpredictable and perilous, and more than most hidden gems, “The Perfection” feels like the sort of queerdo fringe treat - precariously exclusive to a single platform - that I could see inexplicably disappearing behind an ever-heavier corporate curtain if we don’t clap loud enough. ![]() Rather, the singularly strange lezzie body horror gets under my skin because of how and where I watch it. That’s not because it features the single most forced amputations of any Netflix original I have ever witnessed and it’s not because writer/director Richard Shepard manages to simultaneously tap into both my fears of vomiting and maggots via Logan Browning’s mouth at minute 27. “The Perfection” is the only movie from 2019 still keeping me up at night. The Pitch: How Many Lesbian Orchestra Nightmares Even Are There? Then, the spoiler-filled aftermath as experienced by the unwitting editor attacked by this week’s recommendation. Where to Watch This Week's New Movies, from 'Barbie' to 'Oppenheimer' Greta Gerwig Says She's 'Terrified' About Directing 'Chronicles of Narnia' Films On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark takes a feature-length beat to honor fringe cinema in the streaming age.įirst, the spoiler-free pitch for one editor’s midnight movie pick - something weird and wonderful from any age of film that deserves our memorializing. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |