The Perfect Hundred: The Psychological Horror of Beauty

Ali Matlock’s The Perfect Hundred isa 20-minute psychological thriller that flirts with the cult of beauty, featuring a protagonist whose delicate balance of insecurity and self-esteem becomes the playground in which malicious figures wreak havoc without breaking a sweat.

With its disquieting, wideshot flashforward opening, and its in-your-face wellness claptrap in a relentless closeup (of course), this is an oppressive film from the get-go. These two successive sequences, layering fear and “comfort”, set the stage effectively for the viewer to understand and perhaps even identify with Nasha (a wide-eyed Tra’Lynn Husbands).

The plot takes her to a job interview at the exclusive Perfect Pilates studio, the aura a mix of dark magic, cult, and upscale boutique. A regular Black woman in a space clearly designed for Instagram white women, Nasha is out of place and they ensure that she knows it. “They” refers to just the woman in charge (Georgia Kate Haege), but of course, she speaks for the whole business and its clientele. Race, however, becomes subsumed to other plot concerns. Beauty is a multibillion dollar industry; it needs consumers to devour and it cannot be picky. Nasha gets hired after an interview scene that is vaguely, cartoonishly reminiscent of The Devil Wears Prada.

The second half of the film runs into one crisis after another in concentric circles, as Nasha grapples with the irresistible call to mistakes on the very first day of the job. Its longest scene involves a larger cast, masks, and the kind of paraphernalia that would reduce even braver characters to panic. It is both claustrophobic and clumsily handled.

The Perfect Hundred taps into the zeitgeist’s latest (re)discovery of beauty standards (lip fillers are old news and 8-hour shower routines the new trending search query). Culminating in a cast of perfectly groomed bodies instead of characters, all it leaves you room to feel is a deep, dizzying discomfort. The end of the nightmare cannot come soon enough.