Pearl: Film Review
Pearl, Ti West‘s origin story for the elderly villain in 2022’s X, has been out in America for months. After weeks and weeks of dodging clips, tweets and other spoilers online, I finally know what all the excitement is about.
The movie is set in 1918 in Texas and tells the story of Pearl (Mia Goth), a young ambitious girl who dreams of being a movie star. She resents her strict German immigrant mother Ruth (Tandi Wright) and her paralysed father (Matthew Sutherland) and is fed up with waiting for her husband Howard (Alistair Sewell) to return home from the war. As we already know from X, Pearl is a disturbed individual who doesn’t cope with her feelings well (to put it mildly).
If you’re expecting Pearl to be a Texas Chain Saw Massacre-style slasher like X, you’ll be quite mistaken. This film has a very different style and one you would not expect from a slasher film. It pays homage to the Golden Age of Hollywood and Technicolor films like The Wizard of Oz, with bright and colourful visuals, an overdramatic score and (deliberately) theatrical acting from Goth.
Goth’s performance in Pearl has been widely praised for months and some even called for her to get an Oscar nomination. I wouldn’t go quite that far but she is sensational as a desperately unhappy and deeply unstable woman. Pearl becomes increasingly unhinged as the film progresses and Goth delivers several standout moments – an emotional six-minute monologue, a fraught confrontation with a lover and a haunting continuous take in the credits.
It took me a while to get into Pearl because it’s not a slasher straight away. It takes its time, establishing her life on the farm with her stifling parents. I found it quite repetitive – “I want to be a star and escape from here” etc – but this bothered me less once Pearl’s true colours started to appear. I would describe it as a character study with slasher moments than a true slasher. The kill count isn’t that high but the deaths are brutal.
It’s not completely essential to watch X before watching Pearl. In fact, you might get more out of X if you watch it afterwards. But, likewise, you’ll get more out of Pearl if you’ve seen X. The only connective tissue is Pearl herself, her husband Howard and the farm (the same set for both) but it’s nice to be able to connect the dots between the two.
The majority of people raved about X and I thought it was good but nothing amazing. That’s exactly how I feel about Pearl. I’m loving Goth’s new scream queen era but outside of her performance, the film didn’t do much for me.
In cinemas from Friday 17th March