Perfect

4 is being generous, as this immediately hits a note of stupefying pretentiousness, with the protagonist asking elemental existential questions in voiceover, in an annoyingly immature voice. (I've noticed this turning into a trend, giving "profound" voiceover narration to actors whom the filmmakers don't seem to realize sound like teenage airheads.) He's in trouble because his blood-drenched girlfriend is dead in his bed and he doesn't know what happened, except that he did it. Mommy (a really thankless caricature of a role for Abbie Cornish) whisks him off in her limo to a retreat center of some sort where he'll get "fixed." But in this vague, kinda-sorta sci-fi story, he doesn't get fixed, he just get worse. Gee: You'd think carving chunks out of his head and replacing them with translucent plastic cubes would have done the trick just fine!

There is no question that "Perfect" is total pretentious twaddle, with all the signs of people who've made it in lucrative but extremely shallow media (I'm assuming music videos and commercials), so they managed to drum up a fair amount of money to spend on a quintessential "Well it seemed deep when I was stoned, which is all the time" project that has no real story or ideas, just a whisper of a premise. (Several of the main collaborators were also involved in "Kuso," about which you could say exactly the same things.)

There's a lot of picturesque posing by frequently nude people with good physiques, artily shot; in other words, a lot of music video material, albeit with more full nudity. The script, such as it is, consists largely of empty koans like "The problem with the truth is that once you know it, you can't unknow it." (Yes, this is the kind of movie that thinks such pronouncements are meaningful, neglecting to notice that the only source of actual meaning would lie in that "truth," which of course it never defines.) Though most of "Perfect" is more like a filmed fashion layout than a horror movie (or a narrative, period), it does occasionally make an effort at providing some "shocking" content. The zenith of that effect (involving flesh consumption) strains so, SO hard to break a "taboo" that I couldn't stop laughing. The only other real laugh came during the final credits, when people received billing for "story" and "screenplay."

You can't talk about acting in a movie like this--the actors are mostly stuck just posing, doubtless with zero help in terms of motivation etc. from the director. But hollow and affected as it is, "Perfect" is still technically accomplished, and has enough of interest in purely aesthetic terms to bump up my rating a star or two. For one thing, its primary location is apparently a real, somewhat famous mid-century-modernist estate in L.A., and it is architecturally very striking, as well as very well utilized by the cinematographer.

This is the classic example of a movie that would look fascinating if it were projected without sound as background at a club--it's only when you actually pay attention and realize there's "no there there" that it becomes exasperating. The pure abstraction of the final-credits computer graphics is more successful than anything else here, because it sloughs off the pretense of aiming for anything beyond simply looking cool. The music by Flying Lotus didn't blow me away, but it's diverse and interesting enough. All the things that are normally window-dressing in movies with actual substance are the ONLY substance here, and they are fine. It's just in the realms of, you know, storytelling, characters, depth, tension, empathy, et al. that "Perfect" is just about non-existent.