Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on July 9, 2007, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Imagine Underworld meets Children of Men, and you’ll have some idea of what to expect from Perfect Creature, a New Zealand production making its U.S. debut on DVD after a couple of years on Fox’s shelf. Writer/director Glenn Standring’s film echoes the former with its premise of supernatural beings fighting among themselves as well as with humans, and recalls the latter via a late-arriving plot twist and by setting the action in a gloomy, dystopian Britain. Actually, the locale is never specified, but most of the leads hail from the UK and a good deal of the action plays out amidst Dickensian slums, complete with scruffy young orphans and a nasty character named Sykes. Twists, on the other hand, are unfortunately hard to come by.
Perfect Creature is the kind of movie where you get the nagging sense that the really interesting stuff is happening offscreen. Standring posits an alternate Earth where 300 years ago, alchemy gave birth to an alternate race known as “The Brotherhood”; they possess the familiar fangs and taste for blood, but the v-word is never mentioned. As the story opens, the Brotherhood and humans have enjoyed a symbiotic co-existence in a world where, because that alchemy also led to the creation of virulent diseases, scientific progress was nipped in the bud. Thus, steam is a primary source of energy, air travel hasn’t evolved past zeppelins and reporters still scribble in notebooks. It’s an intriguing environment, evoked convincingly by Standring and his team of craftsmen and shot with palpable if familiar atmosphere by cinematographer Leon Narbey, whose images are richly replicated in the DVD’s 2.35:1 transfer, backed by enveloping Dolby Digital 5.1 sound.
Yet while the backstory is ambitiously imagined, the front story is thin and sketchy, suggesting that a more ambitious narrative got lost somewhere along the line (the film runs only 81 minutes plus credits). Renegade vampire Edgar (Leo Gregory) has broken the three-centuries-old truce and has begun drinking from humans, and his brother Silus (Dougray Scott) is tasked with tracking him down. Silus winds up teaming with Lilly (Saffron Burrows), a human cop who, as has long been required of cops in screen thrillers, has a Tragic Past to overcome. There follows a series of pursuits and confrontations that lack the freshness of their surroundings, and play out with a tone of unvarying solemnity. Exacerbating the glum mood is the performance of Scott, who goes through the whole movie with one almost unbroken glum expression; “I want to share the feeling with you,” Gregory’s rather more energetic Edgar tells him at one point, but no such luck.
At one point, Silus has to resuscitate a gravely injured Lilly with an impromptu transfusion of his own blood, and it would seem to follow that either an infection or some kind of transformation would result—yet nothing comes of this development. Perhaps Standring felt this tack was too obvious, and didn’t want to take that well-traveled road yet again, but it’s thus disappointing that in the third act, as has long been required of heroines in screen thrillers, Lilly’s primary narrative function is to be kidnapped by the villain and require rescue by the hero. The inevitable climactic dustup between Silus and Edgar has a decent visceral impact, but the scenes that follow give the regrettable feeling that the story is only really getting started just as the movie is coming to a close.
The supplemental package is disappointing as well, consisting of just a pair of featurettes totaling about 20 minutes. The Making of Perfect Creature is a standard-issue EPK with the filmmakers and cast saying nice things about each other, too few substantial glimpses of the filming and one brief highlight, exploring the action and body-movement choreography. Designing the Perfect Creature goes a little more in depth as it examines the development of the visual scheme and settings; among its revelations is the fact that many of the Victorian buildings on view were not created via CGI, but existing structures in New Zealand that were photographed, scanned and interpolated into the movie. The result is described by one of the producers in the first featurette as “Se7en meets Blade Runner,” and that’s as valid a simile as the one I offered at the beginning of this review. But even as it calls to mind a number of other previous films, Perfect Creature doesn’t establish a strong enough identity of its own.
