Perfect (2018) Review
★★☆☆☆ Debut feature from Steven Soderbergh protegee Eddie Alcazar, is a pretentious, cult-tinged nightmare.
Deep in the middle of exotic nowhere, a troubled young man (Garrett Wareing — Independence Day: Resurgence) is cutting pieces out of his face. Repeatedly referred to by a disembodied voice as a “treatment”, the wince-inducing process, which also involves a strange cube torn out of what appears to be Japanese toy packaging, is some form of generic alteration designed to enhance the mind and body.
Cut by cut and cube by cube, the young man continues his radical transformation. But instead of being released from his dark urges and achieving inner peace, he finds himself locked in an internal tug-of-war between his rapidly evolving new self, and something more primal.
Or that’s what I thought it was about, anyway.
Perfect looks fantastic. It has a clean and pristine production design, at times evoking the retro-futuristic aesthetic of Blade Runner with its brutalist architecture and clunky tech.
For the most part, it’s very well directed, too; Soderbergh protegee Alcazar clearly has a natural eye for audacious visuals that delight and disgust in equal measure. Live action is augmented convincingly and sparingly with animation, giving certain sequences an almost real-life anime-type of feel. On multiple instances, we get complex tracking shots which seemingly cover every square inch of the film’s impressive single-location setting, filled to the rafters with an equally pleasing parade of impossibly beautiful people.
If you’re happy to watch a film purely for visuals alone, there’s plenty to enjoy here.
But if you, like the majority of us unpretentious folk, are looking for Perfect to give you even just the tiniest of narrative satisfaction, you’re likely going to be left confused, irritated, and probably a little bored to boot.
The film begins with what I can only describe as a stylised montage of vague and morphing fleshy blobs — Cronenberg, by an art student kinda vibes here — with a narration going on about power and dark urges and unity and love and running from the manifestation of your own need to express validation in the face of harmony. Or whatever.
It’s meaningless gumph, the same kind of fake-intellectual monologuing you usually hear from cultish self-help gurus who are either trying to sell a course or get laid, or both. Probably both. After a couple of minutes of this overly confident tripe, it all just becomes white noise. Considering that almost every line of this painfully long 85-minute feature is basically just that, this might be a blessing in disguise.
To his credit, the young Wareing shows real dedication in an early leading role, shaving his head and reportedly losing 30 pounds as part of his character’s dramatic transformation. If I have one lingering takeaway from this mostly rubbish film, it’s him.
But maybe only because he looks perfect (pun intended) should someone decide to make a film about Nosferatu-era Billy Corgan.
Originally published at michaelkenny.uk
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