Perfect Life

The American college fraternity system is a complete mystery to me, yet has proved invaluable to the movie industry, with countless films based around a sorority or fraternity house. In Perfect Life, Jack is keen to join the most exclusive fraternity at Hallford University and is given a series of challenging and dangerous initiation tasks.
 
Jack doesn't help his own cause with his habitual drug use, drinking to excess and sleeping with random women and begins to suffer blackouts. During these, he flashes back to his childhood, growing up on a farm with an abusive father and only his best friend Freddy and love for Anne, the girl next door, to keep him from utter depression. Years later and he is at college with Freddy and Anne, with nothing seemingly having changed in their relationships.
 
The film is very fractured and loops around in time and space as Jack blacks out, repeats the same thing over and over, showing different perspectives each time. There is some childhood trauma that he won't reveal, even to his psychiatrist, but the blackouts get worse and he isn't sure whether they are down to his substance abuse or something more serious. Just as Jack is in the dark, so is the audience who are kept guessing as to what has really happened up until the final reel.
 
Perfect Life is well plotted by Hilde Eynikel and director Josef Rusnak does a great job of holding the thing together, building the tension, mystery and horror. Jesse Bradford is very convincing as Jack, bringing energy and attitude to the role but Scot Williams' foppish Freddy is less plausible, having grown up in the US but still having an English accent so posh that it would seem out of place in the House of Lords!
 
The film is worth watching but certainly is no classic or one that will live long in the memory.
 
I was only supplied with a crappy screener that was in the wrong aspect ratio, stopped right before the credits, had no extra features, a poor mono soundtrack and had compression artefacts throughout, so I can't comment on the retail disc(s)!