Queertober Part 7: The Perfection
If there is one kind of representation I hate almost as much as demonization, it’s idolization. I don’t just want queer stories, I want good queer stories, I want complex queer stories (go see Tár incidentally) and that means the queer characters need to be fully rounded. That means letting them be difficult, be damaged, occasionally be unpleasant. And yeah, especially in the realm of horror, sometimes it means letting them be monstrous.
Not that the leads of The Perfection are precisely monstrous. They do some things that are, objectively, awful; One of them drugs and tricks the other into cutting off her own hand and then they team up to murder and torture a bunch of people. But all of those things are, broadly, explained by the plot. It’s not like they do them for no reason.
That explanation probably sounds like justification, and it is, but let’s not let the actual ethics of the character’s actions weigh on us too heavily, or we’re likely to get caught in the undertow and drown; We’re here for a grim little horror/romance movie where two women team up and fall in love while brutally murdering all of their abusers. Debating the ethics of that is so boring that I don’t even want to entertain it past this paragraph. Especially since I’m more interested in talking about the queer aspects.
Which is interesting, because the queer aspects are barely addressed (outside of one exchange where Charlotte admits that she’s never been with a girl, or indeed anyone, it’s never brought up) but also absolutely vital to the film. The story is about a pair of woman who have been sexually abused by a sadistic teacher as part of a made up cruel teaching style, making either of them men would completely throw off the vibe and instantly make the film more icky in its plotting.
Not that the film is trying to avoid being icky, but turning your sexual abusers into the queer ones isn’t Fun Icky, it’s actually harmful, something that I think the film isn’t interested in. All the moments where it looks like it’s heading in that direction, such as Charlotte pointlessly tormenting Lizzie, or Lizzie threatening to sexually assault Charlotte, all turn out to be misdirects, way of distracting you from its plot machinations, keeping your eyes on the gross stuff while it gets stuff in place.
All of this turns the film into a movie that seems to be in conversation, at least a little bit, with other, older, more cruel films. Even at its nastiest, and it does get rather nasty, the worst stuff is all aimed at the awful people its leads target. It honestly feels a little targeted that at the moment when the film threatens to turn into a sadistic nightmare, when the worst threat it will drop is trotted out, the threat is revealed to be a ruse and instead of violence we get Lizzie and Charlotte reaffirming their affection for each other.
Okay, I might be overstating it here, the film is not actually as complex as I’m making it sound. The movie is far more concerned with being a nasty little piece of work, with getting all of the pieces together to get to its gleefully cruel ending. Not that that’s a bad goal. The film is a slight little thing, and at 90 minutes (and several sequences where it repeats a scene we’ve already seen to make sure we know what was ACTUALLY happening) the film doesn’t really have much time to do much more than the basics required for its plot. The depth is less in the film in itself and more in the ways it differs from its compatriots, the conversation not in the text of the film itself but in the metatext. But those differences aren’t bad, and they signal a change in the way queer people can be portrayed in horror. Not as victims or monsters but of something in between, capable of both cruelty and love and everything in between, capable of earning their own happy endings. After all, our leads are together, playing music (for themselves and not the villains) and obviously still in love, and the rapist is missing all of his limbs. How much happier can you get you in a horror film?
Well we’ll try to answer that with our final queertober film next time, 2021’s The Retreat.
