Mia Goth Has the ‘X’-Factor in Devilish Prequel ‘PEARL’

X Marks The Spot

Ladies and gentlemen, Mia Goth! In Ti West’s remarkably entertaining prequel to X (his other 2022 slasher), Goth plays a woman desperate to be a star but doomed never to be one. The irony is that Pearl should be the movie that propels Goth herself to proper stardom. She’s simply sensational. Featuring as the titular character, Goth steps back into the shoes of a sex-starved, corn-fed, farm-raised vixen with a predilection for murder by pitchfork. This time, West explores her youth, focusing on how her environs and lovelorn family dynamic transform her into the villain we later meet in X.

Pearl dreams daily of leaving her provincial life at the farm behind her. She wants most for love, a thing denied to her by her cruel German-born mother (Tandi Wright) and later robbed once more when her husband Howard (Alistair Sewell) is shipped off to fight in the First World War. That need for love turns into an obsession with fame and unrealistic yearning to be in the pictures.

Stylistically, the world that Pearl finds herself in is brimming with color, even if her life is decidedly drab. Eliot Rockett‘s bright and cheerful cinematography is intentionally evocative of the works of early Hollywood with what appears to be a very playful nod to MGM’s Wizard of Oz. At one point, Pearl dances with a life-like scarecrow. Moments later, they engage in full-blown coitus. We’re left to assume that Pearl’s increasing dissociation and separation from reality – seen in her slaughtering and then feeding farm animals to her “pet” alligator or her general moodiness with those she confides in – is at least in part inspired by the pictures she sneaks off to see. She thinks she can hide her budding psychopathy behind a Hollywood-worthy performance. The trouble is she’s not all that great an actor.
This infatuation drives her into the arms of a local projectionist (David Corenswet), a self-described bohemian who introduces Pearl to the lurid proto-pornography they’re shooting over in Europe. Refusing to live another minute under the watchful eye of her mother, Pearl hatches a plan to escape – either to Europe with the projectionist or via recruitment in a dancing troupe. To her, all that matters if getting off the farm.

The 1918-set film is the first that I can recall that uses the backdrop of the Spanish Influenza to tell its story. The masks that characters wear in public and the chatter about spreading viruses purposefully mirror our own post-pandemic reality, though the parallels start and end there. West suggests he’s less interested in making further connections to our modern times and circumstances than he is in just having fun with the technicolor playground he’s cooked up. A further departure from his other works, West’s most recent film possesses a deliciously dark sense of humor that nearly all of its predecessors have lacked, with Pearl making frequent tongue-in-cheek thematic, visual, and dialogue references to X as well as further Hollywood lore.
Though comparing Pearl against X is (purposefully) an exercise in comparing apples and oranges – West’s commitment to the era of 1910’s filmmaking is so unwavering that even the sound mix is peaky – it’s impossible not to lay the two side by side to pick a favorite. For my money, Pearl is the better experience; it’s character-focused and surprising in ways that X cannot quite manage. While X offers a throwback to the sexualized slashers of the 70’s, Pearl offers up something stylistically unique: a vision of matriarchal madness in hyper-colorized detail. A sympathetic, but totally unwavering, portrait of a farmyard psychopath.

Pearl’s greatest asset is Goth’s commanding central performance. Even before Goth blows the barn doors off with a one-take soliloquy that intensifies every single second that West doesn’t call cut, she still lights up the screen. There’s an intensity and sadness to Goth that West’s film taps into and harnesses like rocket fuel, supercharging both the sympathetic and full-blown psychotic sides of the character. As Hollywood continues to trend more and more towards a deluge of origin stories, at least continue to make them about horny murder grannies.

CONCLUSION: An electrifying improvement over ‘X’, Ti West’s Technicolor slasher is a darkly funny thirst trap; a gory origin story that sees Mia Goth give an absolute scene-stealing performance as the titular Pearl.