This review of ‘Pearl’ is from the Venice Film Festival 2022. It contains spoilers for X.
If Tennessee Williams ever cared to make a slasher with one of his Southern Belles, it might look and feel a little like Pearl, Ti West’s prequel to his A24 porno horror movie, X.
In X, Mia Goth was given the meta job of playing two roles: the film’s curious and alluring young adult film actor Maxine Minx, and the role she revived here, of an elderly woman tormented by her lost youth, being driven to murder the porno filmmakers and performers staying in her farm’s guesthouse. Spoiler alert: Maxine is the X’s final girl. Having successfully avoided being struck down by Pearl and her husband, she flees the farm in their pick-up truck, crushing Pearl’s skull under the wheel on her way out.
The natural course of events would be to chronicle the life of Maxine after that life altering event, but instead Ti West has looked back in time, pondering how this elderly women became so embittered that she practically turns bloody murder into a sport.
Pearl starts in the same farmhouse X is set in, but over five decades earlier, in 1918. World War One has sent many men, including Pearl’s husband, off to Europe to fight. The Spanish flu is sweeping the nation. Curious young Pearl is contained within the gates of her family’s pasture. Her strict German mother expects her to help care for her heavily paralysed father, and tend to the barn animals, as well as the alligator Theda (named, we imagine, after actor Theda Bara) in the pond. As she does this, she whimsically dreams of escape. The glamorous Hollywood feature-length pictures are in their infancy, and she wants to be a part of them or under a stage spotlight.
Behind closed doors, she dances, and sneaks off into town to see the “pictures”, lying to her mother about the unaccounted for time and money. There are only two people who believe in her right to be free and creative: her well-to-do sister-in-law Misty, and the town projectionist played by Hollywood’s David Corenswet, who sees a future for Pearl in the movies (or at least feigns to, in order to charm her into bed). She’s a teenager for whom pipe dreams are destined to remain just that, trying desperately hard to free herself from the constraints of her tiny homestead and become a star, but with too many barriers in the way.
So what lengths does a girl go to find her own path? Well, in Pearl’s case, the most dastardly and the extreme ones. The movie starts with the kind of glossy, early technicolour innocence we’re used to encountering in movies like The Wizard of Oz, another story of a girl trying to achieve her destiny. It’s all very comforting and pastoral: cornfields, rolling fields, cosy movie theatres soundtracked by the flicker of a projector.
But of course, these things are cut through with the kind of callous and discomforting behaviour we’d expect from a slasher. To feed Theda, for example, she drives a pitchfork straight through the corpse of an unsuspecting goose, an action she treats with the same banality as slicing bread. She dry-humps a scarecrow in a field, imagining the projectionist until the point of climax. When she takes a bath in full view of her severely paralysed father, she tests the waters of his pain threshold, pinching the skin on his fingers tightly to see if or how he responds. A life spent under the thumb, with her freedom stolen, has clearly forced Pearl to consider her exit routes. But how far will she go to break free? Well, if you’ve seen X, you already know the answer.
Mia Goth, surprisingly, gets her first solo lead role in Pearl, after a decade of appearing as a supporting character in mainstream and arthouse movies. That restraint, perhaps, has meant we’ve not properly seen her working at full wattage. So here she has it all, harbouring both the maddening nature of a woman on the edge and the doe-eyed emotional complexity of someone stuck in circumstances they detest. She flits between them with a terrifying ease. There’s a lengthy, one-take monologue towards the end of the film that gives her no room to hide, and for those willing to wait through the end credits, you get a single shot so comically deranged and brilliant it confirms the tone Ti West was trying to hit. This is, without doubt, the best she’s ever been.
For Pearl is as much a smart piece of scene-setting cinema as it is a silly, gory slasher movie. It doesn’t take itself seriously, but instead has a rampant and fun time pressing our buttons. Come for the cut up bodies, stay for an unhinged and imaginative movie about the real makings of a murderer.
Pearl is released by A24 in US cinemas on 16 September. Follow i-D on Instagram and TikTok for more on movies.