Netflix's latest horror film, The Perfection, follows two female cello prodigies as they enter into a convoluted friendship-romance that takes a twisted turn.

But for those thinking this is a Black Swan-esque body horror-meets-revenge tale, you're surprisingly off the mark. Why, exactly? Let's begin with the plot in a nutshell.

The film sees Allison Williams play Charlotte, a former cello prodigy who is forced to leave the elite music academy she attends as a child in order to care for her sick mother.

The film begins with Charlotte's mother's death, freeing a now-adult Charlotte up to return to the academy and reconnect with her old tutor, Anton, and the student who essentially took her place after her departure: a talented young woman name Lizzie, played by actress Logan Browning.

Lizzie and Charlotte bond immediately, and their friendship quickly becomes a romance, which takes them on a weekend away. Of course, this weekend jaunt is where we see one of the most disturbing scenes from the film's trailer (which you can watch at the top) play out.

After Charlotte feeds Lizzie some mysterious pills, Lizzie's skin begins to convulse in a horrifying manner and she proceeds to throw up a disturbing substance teeming with bugs. As her skin crawls with insects, she becomes increasingly frantic and grows convinced the only solution us to cut off her arm, at which point Charlotte hands her a meat cleaver and she does the deed herself.

The film then travels back in time to reveal that Lizzie's disturbing illness is, in fact, all in her head. Lizzie is hallucinating as a result of Charlotte giving her her late mother's medication in order to trigger a psychotic episode so she'll cut off her own hand and destroy her cello career.

As expected, Lizzie returns to the academy to find she's useless without her hand and it seems as though her hopes and dreams have been destroyed.

At first, it seems like a cut-and-dry revenge mission—an attempt by Charlotte to cripple her competitor—but there's far more to it.

It turns out Charlotte wasn't trying to hinder Lizzie, but to help her. At the heart of The Perfection is the theme of systemic sexual abuse.

The academy both women attend, the Bachoff Academy of Music, is built around a practice of forcing young students to perform a song titled 'The Perfection' in an acoustically perfect space called 'The Chapel' and, if they fail to perform it to perfection, they are raped and molested by their instructors.

Charlotte's goal was to rescue Lizzie by whatever means necessary (yes, even cutting off her hand) and eventually the two women team up to wreak brutal and absolute havoc on their oppressors.

In the final scene, the two women engage in a bloody physical showdown with Anton and his teaching partner, Paloma, that sees Paloma killed, Anton left unconscious and Charlotte's arm mutilated.

When Anton wakes, all of his limbs have been mutilated, his mouth has been sewn shut and he's forced to watch as the two women he tormented perform 'The Perfection' together, intertwined, each of them making up for the other's missing limbs.

So, what does it all mean? According to the film's director and co-writer, Richard Shepard, The Perfection is ultimately about friendship.

"I felt like this was ultimately a story of friendship," he told Collider.

"Allison's character sees a flashback memory of her as a little girl leaving that academy while young Logan's character is coming up the stairs, and we see that image twice in the movie.

"To me, that was what the movie was, which was that Allison could have said something to her, 'Don't go in there,' but instead didn't, for many reasons. She was a child, she was a victim of abuse; There was a lot of reasons why she didn't do that."

As a result, Charlotte is plagued by her guilt for the entire film.

"She had to live with the pain of what she didn't do," Shepard said. "So this was a movie about someone trying to correct that. She may be completely misguided, maybe, in the way she did do it, but the fact is that that is what the story is about. So there is a level of redemption and, above all, of empowerment, by her ability to do that."

And what of that powerful and disturbing closing image? "It was sexy, and disturbing, and empowering, and crazy, and yet also perfect, in a way," Shepard said. "It really was [perfect] for what they went through, that they would be tied together like that for the rest of their lives."