The Perfection – Madness, Music, and the Price of Genius
Audiences were taken by surprise when The Perfection debuted on Netflix in 2019. What started as a psychological drama featuring a pair of cellists turned into something much more sinister, unsettling, yet oddly beautiful. The film, directed by Richard Shepard and featuring a cast that included Allison Williams and Logan Browning, told a convoluted story of ambition and trauma, and explored the often harmful pursuit of ‘perfection.’ The story, though horrifying and vengeful, was about something profoundly human: the way each and us, institutions, and systems of power manipulate the notion of ‘perfection’ into something poisonous.
The theme extends well beyond Hollywood. The film particularly resonates with Indian audiences, who reside in a culture where self-worth is often dictated by perfection in academics, arts, and social interactions. An eerie silence accompanies the cello strings, asking a universal question: What is the price of perfection?
The Nightmare of Harmony
The Perfection invites viewers to consider the premise of rivalry. Charlotte (Allison Williams) is a former cello prodigy who dedicated herself to caring for her dying mother, and after years, she reconnects with her mentor Anton and meets Lizzie (Logan Browning), the school’s new star. The two women share music, and success and bond over their experiences until a mysterious illness during a bus trip in China alters everything. What follows is a dizzying array of betrayals, hallucinations, and revelations that question everything the viewer previously witnessed.
By the end of The Perfection, the narrative shifts from one about jealousy to one about survival. Charlotte and Lizzie, former rivals, join forces against their abuser, the academy, and the man who ran it. Their revenge is violent but liberating, an act of reclaiming their stolen voices.
Richard Shepard uses horror as metaphor as a way to show how talent, female talent in particular, is exploited under the guise of mentorship.
Allison Williams – From Polite Society to Controlled Chaos
Allison Williams, who stars in Get Out, excels in playing characters who seem polished, poised, and trustworthy, until they are not. Shepard’s decision to cast her as Charlotte was strategic; he wanted someone who would allow the audience to feel safe before ripping that sense of security away.
Williams has talked about how she is drawn to “women on the edge.” The daughter of former journalist Brian Williams, she grew up under the public’s eye, and lived with the kind of light that dictated the virtue of her life. This is probably why her portrayal of Charlotte’s breakdown is so powerful.
During interviews, Williams acknowledged that The Perfection emotionally terrified her. “It’s not exactly a horror movie,” she said, “it’s about what happens when the system breaks you and you still have to perform.” This line resonates with so many Indian realities. Think of students crushed under exam pressure, or artists suffocated by family expectations.
For Williams, the role was also an experiment in control. She trained on the cello for months, preparing for her role and learning the posture and precision of a professional musician. But Shepard asked her to keep some imperfection in her performance. “The mistakes make it human,” he said. That impossibility—the one of mastering chaos—became the center of her work.
Logan Browning – Breaking Free from the Beautiful Trap
Logan Browning, from Netflix’s Dear White People, portrayed Lizzie with a fierce vulnerability. While Williams’s Charlotte is tightly wound, Browning’s Lizzie is radiant, expressive, and outwardly confident. She is the kind of woman everyone assumes has it together. But under the glamor, pain, discipline and the quiet terror of being replaceable lies suffocating glamour.
Browning has discussed her own experiences with the pressures of performance and identity in Hollywood. In interviews, she stated that Lizzie’s journey — from idol to victim to survivor — helped her realize that “you can’t please the system that profits from breaking you.”
Browning reportedly fainted after one intense take while filming the infamously intense “bus scene,” in which Lizzie has a horrifying breakdown. Shepard later commented that the scene required so much physical and psychological energy that it was shot in pieces with hours of recovery time in between. It wasn’t about shock value; it was to allow the audience to experience the claustrophobia of expectation and fear.
The Music That Screamed in Silence
The music in The Perfection isn’t merely background — it’s a weapon, a religion, a haunting. The cello performances are filmed like duels, each note quivering with sexual tension and suppressed rage. The soundscape that composer Paul Haslinger created with classical music and distorted strings is both beautiful and sickening.
The Indian parallels, in the portrayal of artistic training in the film, draw upon the emerging accounts of students in isolation, abuse, and the dance academies and music conservatories. Discipline is worshiped, mentors are worshiped, and mistakes are punished. When The Perfection reveals the dark side of that worship, it is painfully familiar.
The dying moment is the final performance, in which the two women play the cello together, each using one arm. It symbolizes revenge, and it is also a rebirth, a visual metaphor for the reclaiming of the broken bodies and the shattered identities.
The Disarray Behind the Camera
The making of The Perfection was almost as unpredictable as the movie itself. Richard Shepherd, known for his sharp comedies (The Matador, Dom Hemingway), wanted to see how far he could test the audience’s willingness to engage with discomfort. “I wanted to create something that shifts genres a few times. It starts as a romance, shifts to horror, and ends as an empowerment story.”
Netflix’s initial worry was audience reaction to the film’s sexually explicit content and swings in genres. The film’s first test screenings were decidedly lukewarm; some audiences called it “a masterpiece of madness,” while others dismissed it as “unwatchable.” However negative audience reaction was, the film’s marketing embraced it.
Allison Williams and Logan Browning did most of their stunts, especially the physically demanding ones in the academy basement. The production team also kept the set closed down during these scenes in order to promote a sense of intimacy and concentration. Crew members described the atmosphere as “respectful but heavy.” They were dealing with sensitive and challenging material — trauma, abuse, and recovery — and cast members frequently stayed in character to help each other maintain the necessary intensity.
One aspect of The Perfection that tends to go unacknowledged is the fact that two separate drafts of the ending were written before it was finalized. The first draft left the story with only one woman surviving; however, both Williams and Browning advocated for an ending where the two women were able to stand together. Not as victims, but as equals. Shepard concurred with this perspective and described it as “the soul of the film.”
The Buzz that Refused to Die
The Perfection was one of the first movies to go “straight to Netflix” in 2018 and was instantly recommended as one of those “you have to see it to believe it” movies. Spoiler-free tweets that included warnings such as “Just trust me and watch” proliferated. While critics were divided on their opinions, no one was able to ignore the film. Some advocated for it, while others criticized it for being “exploitative.”
The film earned a peculiar cult following in India among younger film makers and film lovers. On forums such as Reddit, the film was discussed in comparison to Whiplash and Black Swan. The conversation was centered around the Western classical rigidity and hierarchies with Indian classical. The “guru-shishya” relationship and obsession as a negative focus were discussed in the conversations.
The Stare was also used as a meme, where Charlotte’s emotionless gaze during the last act of vengeance was used to signify “taking your power back.” Many women viewed her as a survivor of systemic cruelty rather than a villain.
A Symphony of Pain and Liberation
At its essence, The Perfection is not about music or madness, but surviving through art, and through the lens of an Indian narrative on artistic pursuit, the question it poses is how much one must bleed to attain greatness. The cello becomes the instrument of both imprisonment and escape.
Logan Browning and Allison Williams’ journeys marked with self-doubt, discipline, and reinvention seamlessly integrate with their characters. The bold direction of Richard Shepard captures the emotional turmoil of anyone that has ever tried to pursue greatness.
Through it all, The Perfection does not celebrate perfection. It offers a critique, revealing that the most art, and the most humanity, comes not from perfection, but from surviving the imperfections that nearly take you down.
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