Perfect, the new film executive produced by Steven Soderbergh and directed by Eddie Alcazar is hard to describe. In essence, it’s a sci-fi horror thriller about an automaton named Vessel 13 (Garret Wareing) who is sent to a rehabilitation facility of sorts after he accidentally murders his girlfriend. Hoping to purify himself of his violent urges, he literally cuts out the bad parts of himself and replaces them with “treatments” that are supposed to fix him. However, as the treatment goes on and 13’s visions become more grotesque, it seems less and less likely that he can be healed.
However, while that plot description makes the film sound pretty involving, when it starts, it’s hard to tell exactly in what direction Alcazar’s film might go. The modern architecture and futuristic technology are pure sci-fi, but the visions 13 has before and after his treatments are pure psychological horror. The film could go anywhere from its bloody beginning and part of why it’s so engrossing is that the storytelling is so gradual that it doesn’t feel like it actually starts until nearly 30 minutes in.
Until then, what keeps the film interesting is the filmmaking itself. Even when what we see is violent or visceral, every image is beautiful. In part that’s due to cinematographer Matthias Koenigswieser. The play of light and shadows in any given moment feels decadent and the already beautiful spaces become even more opulent. That’s even truer of the gorgeous young bodies of 13 and his fellow automatons in the treatment center. Every character is constantly either half-naked in a way that shows off their perfect flesh or draped in glamorous clothing. There’s a distinct fetishism to everything we see and it creates a bizarrely carnal tone. That said, that fetishism is often driven by a particularly leering male gaze.
Perfect is about sexual violence against women from its opening scene, but as it goes on, it becomes unclear if Alcazar–who conceived the story with Ted Kupper, who in turn wrote the screenplay–doesn’t fall into the same misogyny he’s presumably trying to critique. There are women all over the film, but they most often function as beautiful objects for the male characters to watch and occasionally brutalize. When 13 or the other men approach any scantily clad women, we can always read the predatory urge in their body language.
Even more disturbing are the more overt scenes of sexual violence and female objectification. While one scene where a male character puts on fake breasts and cries as he manhandles them is confusing at best and horribly misogynistic at worse, 13’s visions are by far the film’s most troubling imagery. Though a scene that intercuts 13 running his hands over the ass of the girlfriend he murdered and a vision of him tying a girl to a stake and then burning her is awful, it’s a seemingly more innocuous scene that’s most memorable.
As the mysterious doctor running the center talks about 13 becoming a man, we watch 13, now scarred from his treatments and with his head half shaved as a reflection of his fracturing mind, eat a peach. It’s not the sloppy, animalistic way he eats the peach that’s so upsetting, it’s the indiscriminate destruction in the face of personal pleasure. The mysterious female voice (of Tao Okamoto) directing 13’s treatments at one point says that his problems come from his “animal brain” not being fit for a civilized world and while that may just be a metaphor for whatever Alcazar is trying to say, it’s worrisome that the film suggest 13’s behavior–particularly his violence toward women–is natural with so little analysis of that assertion. And while that reading may be entirely unintended, the film is ultimately so circumspect in its messaging that it’s hard to nail down any meaning at all.
In the end, Perfect feels more like video art than a film. It’s beautiful to look at and it’s clearly playing with big ideas about identity and masculinity, but by remaining so abstract in its storytelling, it’s hard to take anything concrete from it. Rather, watching it feels like an 80-minute commercial for an opulent, minimalist lifestyle told through a kink for sexual violence against women. Some will undoubtedly find more meaning in its ponderous artistry, but it may be best to avoid those people.
