Trapped on her family’s isolated farm, Pearl must tend to her ailing father under her devout mother’s bitter and overbearing watch. Hoping for a more glamorous life, Pearl’s ambitions, temptations, and repressions all collide to horrific effect.
Ti West’s A24 horror offering “X” offered much love to the horror history of the ’70s with direct thoughts on censorship, sexuality, and bloody massacres. Here he (and Mia Goth) is delivering a prequel to his pulpy horror original with a new original set in a world utterly different from its predecessor and also distinctly original. Set in 1918, West leans into the bright iconography of early filmmaking while slowly pulling back the gleeful charm to reveal a deeply disturbed killer. “Pearl” is a bit long in the tooth for its runtime, and the execution muddies the waters as far as tone, but overall the slide from campy musical to blood-soaked slasher feels natural if not inspired.
Origin stories can underwhelm audiences. Often they elaborate on the mythology of the world, and our easter egg-focused world can often miss the forest for the cinematic universe trees. Thankfully, Ti West and Mia Goth thread the needle eloquently by not focusing too sharply on what makes “X” so great and instead on what makes “Pearl” so enjoyable. The compassion in the previous film for its murderous antagonist makes much more sense given that the two wrote the script for “Pearl” in the two-week quarantine period leading up to shooting “X” in New Zealand.
Mia Goth plays Pearl, the titular character. Pearl’s life on an idyllic rural farm suffocates her. Between caring for her infirm father, navigating a punishing mother, and feeding countless farm animals, Pearl finds time to dream of being in the movies. Her husband, Howard (Alistair Sewell), is off to war in France, and Pearl’s mother has hidden their family from the rest of the town to avoid the latest plague (and also to avoid scrutiny for being German immigrants.) When Pearl’s sister-in-law tells her of an audition for a dance group touring the State, she can’t help but get excited. Her big break! In the days leading up to Pearl’s audition, her life falls apart, she takes a new lover, her mother cracks down too harshly, and Pearl’s real personality starts to show. Who is at risk if Pearl doesn’t get the part? Will she escape the harsh reality of her life on the farm? What will happen when Howard comes back?
Ti West doesn’t fear incorporating a blissful tone at the film’s beginning. Its color-soaked first thirty minutes evoke “The Wizard of Oz” fame as Pearl dances and sings to farm animals about her trapped life. We’re gifted a vision of her murderous tendencies early on when she stabs a goose with a pitchfork and feeds it to the local alligator. Mia Goth’s performance here anchors the entire film, and it’s a feat to carry the audience through her stunning transformation. Throughout the film, she goes from a light-hearted pure farm girl to a murderous, emotionally unstable reject. Mia Goth gets one great monologue that lasts twelve minutes on just her face, and her performance summarizes the character’s trajectory so thoroughly it makes explicit her transformation in such a small part.
The world of this film feels wholly realized in a way that prevents us from noticing limited budget effects but instead highlights that vision. There are a few locations in the movie, mostly nicely upscaled versions of the same places from “X,” with the addition of a church and a movie theater. Still, all these places feel fresh and new. The color saturation in the film early on soaks every frame. The skies are the bluest they’ve ever been. The grass looks extra green. The entire world feels brighter than ever. The coloration of the film adds pops of brightness to a dark subject, especially when Pearl starts murdering. The blood on her arms pops like a Dario Argento film. The red dress she wears covers her head-to-toe in bright, vibrant notes. It’s the kind of color coding that early colored films employ to show off new technology; only here, its garishness becomes explicit as Pearl turns to murder.
“X” brought human sexuality as the cornerstone of psychosis, and “Pearl” is no different. The discussion of pornography here comes hand-in-hand with “X” ’s thesis made explicit: pornography has been around as long as cameras have. Ti West draws on that dark cousin to sunny filmmaking and exploits it as Pearl sees a depraved version of her favorite. Her hopes of escaping, wrapped up in the “pictures,” could just as quickly be portrayed through her sexuality instead of femininity. It’s an oblique commentary, but it feeds directly into Pearl’s psychological breakdown, making her transformation more potent. She can’t fathom not being in the pictures and to see her beloved pictures turned into something so puerile makes her psyche crack in half.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t admit the film feels overly long at times. While incredible for sheer performative willpower and memory alone, Mia Goth’s monologue at the end seems like a wrap-up of the entire film and almost entirely spells out her broken worldview. It’s spoon-feeding character transitions to us or giving us the perspective we didn’t implicitly grasp at first. Lots of what she says feels important, but I felt myself drifting off during sections of the long take. Sort of an actor’s exercise to go from Angry to Happy over a sixty-second count, Mia Goth plays plenty of scenes taking her time transitioning from distraught to murderous. It works when we expect it to happen, but we don’t always buy it when it’s drawn out too long.
“Pearl” is a fantastic entry into top-of-the-line slasher movies. It’s got its psychology down pat. We find ourselves rooting for Pearl even as she breaks necks and stabs geese. Mia Goth’s performance anchors the entire film and gives us so much to latch on to. West has one last film in this “trilogy” to give us so here’s to hoping Mia Goth and Ti West trim a little fat and their next movie Maxxxine gives us the best of both “X” and “Pearl.”
In Theaters Friday, September 16th
