This Netflix Horror Gave Us Allison Williams’ Most Unsettling Role (original) (raw)

Published Jun 20, 2023, 1:00 PM EDT

Jasneet Singh is a writer who finally has a platform to indulge in long rants about small moments on TV and film in overwhelming detail. With a literature background, she is drawn to the narrative aspect of cinema and will happily rave about her favorite characters. She is also waiting for the Ranger's Apprentice novels to be adapted... but the cycle of hope and disappointment every two years is getting too painful to bear.

First known as the stereotypically infuriating New Yorker Marnie Michaels from HBO's Girls, Allison Williams has made her mark in the horror film industry, particularly in psychological horror. The complete turnaround in her role as a frustrating but complex millennial in Girls into a cold-blooded murderer in her first horror film, Get Out, was an unexpected change that truly showcased her strengths. Or at least her capacity to perform homicidal acts and sociopathy. Williams' ability to appear unassuming and morally ambiguous at the same time also translated to her more recent role as Gemma in M3GAN. But her most unsettling performance was in 2018, where she fully immersed herself into the horror genre as the often deceptive but maniacal Charlotte in The Perfection.

Allison Williams Has Found a Niche in Psychological Horror

Allison Williams drinking milk in Get Out

Image via Universal Pictures

Finding her character niche in psychological horrors, Allison Williams has given us a new kind of character to be wary of and to downright hate. Diving straight into the horror pool, her unassuming appearance has worked to cunningly garner Chris’ (Daniel Kaluuya) and the audience’s trust in Get Out, only to shatter it with one completely deadpan line: “You know I can’t give you the keys, right?” From that moment, Williams’ characters are always taken with a grain of salt. She's never your traditional female character archetype — neither the final girl nor the scream queen — and instead thrives in the role of a "toxic white girlboss" character. Doused in ambition and single-mindedness, Williams' characters lean immensely towards rationality, to the point that emotions and ethics are often second-tier to whatever goal she has in mind.

Her most recent horror role, Gemma in M3GAN, also plays into this character type but she ends up redeeming herself. Gemma displays a distinct lack of empathy and whose culpability in the droid's killing spree is questionable. Pawning off the care of her niece to an artificially intelligent doll-like robot, it's clear that Gemma is uncomfortable with not only her niece's feelings but also her own. This is emphasized by the fact that even the robot (near the start of the film) has more emotional intelligence and capacity than Gemma. This emotional disconnect is a consistent component throughout her psychological horror roles, or at the very least, some degree of psychological dissociation. The ambiguity surrounding her accountability for the doll's actions as her toy-maker also reinforces this notion of the missing link between her character's psyche and humanity. We then witness Gemma growing closer to her niece and eventually starting to fiercely care for her, slowly closing that distance between herself and her emotions. Her character in The Perfection also does initially demonstrate these overly rational traits but completely deviates after the second act. Charlotte is not only starkly different from Williams' previous roles because she is well-intentioned throughout but also because she increasingly exhibits bouts of intense emotional violence as the film progresses.

What Is 'The Perfection' About?

Netflix's twisted thriller The Perfection

Image via Netflix

The Perfection is essentially a campier version of Black Swan, with a lack of the same intensity and a sapphic romance added. Broken into three acts, the first is where we see the “she’s too good to be true” version of Charlotte as she meets her replacement cello prodigy, Elizabeth (Logan Browning). After being forced to drop out of a prestigious musical academy and surrender her place as the school's prodigy to take care of her sick mother, Elizabeth is initially framed to have motives of revenge. That is until we see her fall for Elizabeth in a sequence operating on a dual timeline with a musical and a physical climactic duet. The second act begins with Elizabeth inviting Charlotte on a "rough and tumble" bus trip across China, where Elizabeth's health subsequently declines, aided by the overconsumption of pills, until she starts hallucinating bugs in her body. This act showcases a very different side to Williams' horror character: indulging more panicky scenes until the final moment of the act where she pulls out a comically large hatchet and nonchalantly says "You know what to do," urging Elizabeth to cut off her hand in a delirium. But the campy flashback montage reveals the more sociopathic side of Charlotte as she strategically induces and guides Elizabeth's hallucinations to ensure she cannot play the cello permanently, playing back into her hallmark role as an emotionally and morally detached character.

The most unsettling part of her performance is during this second act, managing to balance the perfect amount of trustworthiness with momentary scenes of unreadable expressions that cast doubt on her motives. Throughout her performance, she doesn't clue us in about her intentions at all, yet she manages to elicit a gut-instinct reaction of edginess from us. The morbidly intense scenes of dramatic cello playing coupled with the abrupt violent outbursts make her character unpredictable throughout the film. After Get Out, we thought we knew what to expect, but she almost flippantly subverts this in The Perfection. When we discover that Charlotte was actually helping Elizabeth, it may earn some endearment from the crowds, but it really renders her previous performance that much more eerie. Turns out, the academy teachers had been sexually assaulting their resident prodigies as a punishment for making minute mistakes — ergo, Charlotte compels Elizabeth to cut off her own hand to not only save her from the assault but to open her eyes to her abuser's lack of loyalty to her. The degree of compartmentalization and dissociation required to take such drastic and counter-intuitive measures for someone's well-being can only be classed as a psychological phenomenon. But Williams finds a way to make it believable. This distinct disconnect is absolutely where her strengths lie, allowing for more complex characters that are pulled off with masterful acting. And although her more emotional scenes are not as impactful, they are provoking enough to emphasize her true skills of being uncanny.

Allison Williams Is at Her Best When She's Playing Morally Ambiguous Characters

Allison Williams in The Perfection

Image Via Netflix

The distinctive trait that connects all three of Williams' horror roles is their varying degrees of sociopathy. From her role as Rose in Get Out, as a sweet "woke" girlfriend who serves her Black boyfriends up on a platter for her family, to Charlotte in The Perfection, who induces a reality hit in her love interest by chopping off a limb, to Gemma in M3GAN, who would prefer artificial intelligence emotionally nurturing her niece instead of her. However, I think it's fair to say that Rose takes the crown as the biggest sociopath of them all. Their capacity to perform obscene or questionable acts by emotionally distancing themselves coupled with Williams' "girl from next door" appearance gives her characters a unique flavor. With the type of roles she's played so far, it is unlikely we would ever trust her character again.