The Unicorn Scale: The Perfection

I must confess to not being the biggest fan of Halloween. I do love horror films, though, and Halloween is a great excuse to turn the lights off and settle down to a scary classic.

The Perfection, however, is definitely not your traditional horror film. The queer characters are the protagonists (for a change), and the horror is of the mind-bending violent revenge type. It’s also virtually impossible to talk about without SPOILERS, so please consider yourselves warned.

The plot revolves around Charlotte (Allison Williams), a cellist at a prestigious music school who quits her studies on the cusp of stardom to care for her ailing mother. Years later, Charlotte makes contact with her old mentor at the school and meets Lizzie (Logan Browning), the School’s latest star cellist. The two young women are instantly attracted to each other and embark on an ill-fated trip through rural China that sets off a chain of violent revenge that leads right back to the academy.

For those not familiar, this is how the Unicorn Scale works.

What I Liked:

The one thing I really liked about this film is the relationship between Charlotte and Lizzie. From their first meeting, there is an obvious attraction, and whilst Lizzie’s confident flirting seems to momentarily surprise Charlotte, the film appears entirely uninterested in sensationalizing this budding same-sex relationship.

It’s also clearly hinted that this is not simply two lesbians who have fallen for each other. After sex, Lizzie gently asks Charlotte, “Have you ever been with a woman before?" to which she replies, “I've never been with anyone before.” This brief exchange, along with the complete lack of any post-sex "questioning," is the only insight we have into these young women’s sexualities — and to my mind, strongly suggests that neither of them sees themselves as exclusively monosexual.

Of course, now that I’ve mentioned it, I can’t really avoid talking about the sex scene. Thankfully, most of the worst clichés are avoided. It’s not particularly explicit and is refreshingly low on the "male gaze," too. It genuinely seems to be a way of illustrating the strength of Charlotte and Lizzie’s attraction, rather than just an excuse for cheap titillation.

Another aspect of the film I liked was a tiny moment during one of the more hard-to-watch scenes. (And there are a few!) Charlotte is helping an unwell Lizzie get cleaned up after dramatically losing control of her bowels by the side of the road. A clearly mortified and feverish Lizzie is apologizing profusely, but Charlotte simply looks up at her and says, “I took care of my mom for years. I can handle this.”

This is an important line to me because the events of this road trip are eventually reframed to show that Charlotte was hiding some very sinister ulterior motives here, yet this moment is tender and sincere and the first clue that there’s more than one twist in the plot to come.

What I Didn’t Like:

This is a film with two queer main characters, which is great. However (and we’re heading deep into spoiler territory here), we also find out that they are both capable and willing to use extreme violence. If you’re sensitive about any implied connection between bisexual and duplicitous behavior, this film will definitely give you plenty of food for thought. A later scene even reveals that Charlotte was previously institutionalized at a psychiatric hospital for electric shock therapy, which for me takes things a bit too far into cliché territory.

I do understand that this is a horror film first and a queer love story a distant second, but I would have liked just a little bit more context on their getting together. Is Lizzie asking Charlotte about her sexual history because she’s never been with a woman before, or because she suspects Charlotte hasn’t? It’s slightly frustrating that they open the door to this conversation yet never walk through it. We also have to question Charlotte’s sincerity in these early scenes following one of the later big plot twists, so it’s at least possible she could be lying to Lizzie anyway.

Whilst I liked that this was a film devoid of labels, with not one instance of the word gay or lesbian coming from any of the characters, it also means no one used the words bi, pan, or queer either. And this lack of labels did occasionally make me wonder whether the writers really were trying to make a connection between their sexual behavior and their scheming violence. It could even just be that they were thoughtlessly recycling lazy stereotypes, but that’s not much better, really.

The Rating:

I really loved this film. I’m not 100% convinced it handles its central themes of rape, revenge, and violence particularly well — but I also understand that this is a hyper-real horror film universe, where nuance and sensitivity take a necessary back seat to gory set-pieces and shocking twists.

For our purposes, though, I’m going to be bold and award it three unicorns. The queer romance at the heart of the film is pretty solid. No one is conflicted or punished, and it’s never hinted that this is just a "phase" for either of them. They’re not even sex-obsessed, killed-off, or hyper-sexualized — and that’s a pretty impressive list of avoided cliches when you consider they’re the main characters.

Okay, yes, they’re both violent and duplicitous. But I’m pretty happy that these characteristics are directly related to the revenge aspect of the storyline and are not meant to be a commentary on their sexualities.

So, should you watch this film? If you like your horror films gory and mind-bending, there’s a good chance you’ll love it. But if you’re looking for a film with two realistically portrayed queer main characters, well, maybe this isn’t all that bad either.