Netflix's latest horror hit is thrilling viewers even as it challenges the audience to figure
out what the heck is actually happening.
From blades to bugs and that wild final act, here's our breakdown of what it all means
in the ending of The Perfection.
Spoilers ahead!
The Perfection's story is told in fragments presented out of order.
That first becomes clear when we see Charlotte and Lizzie's trip through China first through
Lizzie's eyes, drugged and without context, and then from Charlotte's perspective.
Telling the story this way was a risky move for director Richard Shepard and company,
but non-traditional story structure has paid off in the past for movies like Reservoir
Dogs and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind films for which planting uncertainty
in the audience leads to a satisfying payoff and makes trying to guess what's going on
part of the fun.
The Perfection adds to this by attaching that uncertainty to what should be a pretty simple
question in a horror picture: who's the monster here?
It's only as the story nears its violent climax that we truly understand that the real monster
is Anton, head of the Bachoff Academy.
The events of The Perfection may feature a ton of twists and narrative shifts, but the
action and horror is all part of the journey to the end.
A decade after leaving Bachoff Academy, Charlotte is still trying to deal with the damage done
to her at the school.
From the start, we get the impression that this woman has unresolved, possibly dangerous
mental issues.
The tension mounts as she heads to Shanghai to meet her former teacher, Anton.
There, Charlotte falls back into the good graces of the school's staff and gets seduced
by the new star pupil, Lizzie.
The two decide to take a trip into the Chinese countryside together, and stuff starts to
get prescription strength weird.
On the trip, Charlotte drugs Lizzie with medication she took from her mother, inducing a stomach
flu and hallucinations.
The two are kicked off their bus in the middle of nowhere, and Charlotte convinces a delusional
Lizzie that her hand is full of bugs, prompting Lizzie to go 127 Hours on herself with a cleaver.
We learn towards the very end of the film that after Lizzie wakes up, Charlotte is still
with her.
She tells Lizzie that this was the only way to free her from the Academy's brainwashing,
and that they'll turn their backs on her now that she's no longer useful to them.
Charlotte returns home, and Lizzie tries to go back to Bachoff.
Although Anton lets Lizzie stay at Bachoff for awhile, he eventually kicks her out just
like Charlotte predicted.
Bitter and lost, Lizzie proceeds to break into Charlotte's house, intent on killing
her.
Then Lizzie brings Charlotte back to the Bachoff Academy as a prisoner.
She's chained up and forced to play for the staff and misses one note.
As the faculty close in on her, though, they start falling to the floor because Lizzie
has drugged their drinks.
Through the final flashback, we return to Charlotte's house and see Lizzie finally acknowledging
that Charlotte was right she'd been brainwashed, and they both agree that the creeps at Bachoff
need to be stopped.
In the final shots of the movie, we see Charlotte and Lizzie playing a single cello together,
each with one arm.
Anton, meanwhile, is dismembered, blinded, and castrated, hooked up to a feeding tube,
being forced to listen.
It's a bizarre, yet emotional moment for both the audience and for Lizzie and Charlotte.
The room they're in, the Chapel, had always been a sacred place for Anton.
It's where he dreamed of hearing perfection.
Veteran students were brought in there to play a perfect piece, only to be punished
when they missed a note.
"We don't make mistakes here, not when we represent the academy."
With all his limbs gone and his eyes and mouth sewn shut, Anton is essentially locked in
a mental prison where he's forced to listen to Charlotte and Lizzie play forever.
What if they miss a note?
Who cares!
They're playing for themselves now, and Anton has no choice but to endure it.
It probably goes without saying that this movie is rooted deeply in recent social phenomena
like the Time's Up and #MeToo movements, and it brings a level of fictionalized catharsis
in the form of a gruesome conclusion.
This is a long-running tradition in the horror genre: a character or force representing a
real-world fear is brought down by the forces of good.
Alien famously used its xenomorphs as an allegory for sexual violence, and Get Out pretty brilliantly
turned racism and gentrification into a Frankenstein monstrosity.
In the same way, The Perfection tackles institutionalized abuse, gaslighting, and toxic misuse of power.
When Charlotte and Lizzie force a severely de-limbed Anton to listen to them play, they're
not just reclaiming their power, they're asserting their self-worth over an abusive power structure
that spent years objectifying them.
If you saw the trailer for The Perfection, you were probably pretty intrigued.
You were also probably wildly thrown off when you watched the actual movie.
The trailer for The Perfection made it out to be something it was decidedly not: a bug
infestation freakout picture.
It made heavy use of the scene when, stranded on the side of the road, Lizzie screams at
Charlotte about the bugs crawling inside of her arm.
Beyond that, we're not given much information as to what the film is about, besides being
informed that Charlotte is the kind of person who's always prepared in case a meat cleaver
might come in, wait for it, handy.
"You know what you have to do."
Netflix was pretty cautious about not giving anything away in the trailer, and it makes
sense.
The movie's emotional gravity is predicated on the audience having as little information
as possible.
And in a messed up sort of way, it's kind of fitting that a movie based on surprising
twists was marketed through yet another twist.
With everything happening onscreen, the audience could pretty easily overlook some of the musical
cues in The Perfection.
The thing is, some of that music is pretty important.
For one thing, Anton is pretty consistently associated with Mozart's Requiem in D minor.
It's a bombastic, foreboding series of pieces, the most dramatic of which, "Dies Irae," plays
when Anton approaches Lizzie in the driveway, unaware that he's about to be horribly dismembered
as a result of his own misdeeds.
Aside from the song's lyrics about judgement and reckoning, you could go even deeper with
this choice of music.
The story goes that Mozart told his wife that he was writing the mass for his own funeral.
When he died before completing the Requiem, he left the completion of the composition
to one of his former assistants.
Intentional or not, it's a fitting song to play as Anton arrives at his eventual doom
in a school which will soon be controlled by his own former students.
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