TIFF 2022 Film Review: Pearl
MIA GOTH IS A FORCE IN TI WEST’S COLORFUL, BLOODY PREQUEL PEARL
Coverage of TIFF’s Midnight Madness begins here! The Golden Age of Hollywood meets the bloody end of a pitchfork, Ti West’s colorful prequel is the perfect companion piece to this year’s X. Expanding Mia Goth’s performance into an unhinged showcase with a jaw-dropping, single-take monologue, Pearl leaves behind the grimy 70s porn slasher for the pastures of a technicolor nightmare. Spoilers for X and minor spoilers for Pearl ahead…
With gnarly bloodshed flooding the set of a 1970s Texas porno, Ti West’s vicious and surprisingly tender X was the horror hit of this year’s SXSW Film Festival. A clever amalgamation of films such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Debbie Does Dallas, West’s first feature since 2016’s In the Valley of Violence slowly unspooled a beating, sex-positive heart through vintage slasher pastiche. In X, Mia Goth pulled double duty in dual roles. She is Maxine, an aspiring star and the requisite final girl of the film’s gruesome mayhem. And hidden under loads of expert prosthetics and makeup? She is also Pearl, the repressed and murderous wife of a farmer, doling out X’s string of increasingly brutal kills against the victims of her rage, ire, and sexual envy.
Pearl, X’s surprise prequel, finds Goth reprising the titular role, flashing back to a colorful and anachronistic tribute to the Golden Age of Hollywood. It’s 1918, and Pearl - already beleaguered with the hardships that will eventually fracture her psyche - resides on a familiar Texas farm with her cruel, vindictive mother and her catatonic father. Spanish Flu, or “the germ,” is in the air, and Pearl - desperate for love and freedom - just wants to be a star, drawing an emotional throughline straight to X’s Maxine. She practices her song and dance in hopes of her big break, while straining under the weight of her homestead frustrations; her husband, Howard, is on the frontlines of the Great War, her mother takes every opportunity to quash her dreams, and she serves as her paralyzed father’s primary caregiver. The only respite for Pearl is when she runs her errands, taking solace in furtive visits to the local movie theater.
Swirling amidst homage ranging from The Wizard of Oz to Norman Rockwell Americana, Goth ignites a hypnotic fuse counting down to her eventual breaking point.
With X’s ensemble cast, Ti West found dimension in both the killers and their victims, “ripping the rug from under us to interrogate the dichotomies of the young and old, free and repressed.” Pearl, however, is Mia Goth’s show. West is offered layup opportunities to comment on objectification, abuse, and pandemic parallels, but he mostly ignores these now ubiquitous ambitions. With its slack tension (Pearl is the killer!) and thin melodrama - most of it by design - the film hones in on its entirely different modus operandi: to center the unraveling of a woman on the verge. And Goth is an absolute force. Swirling amidst homage ranging from The Wizard of Oz to Norman Rockwell Americana, Goth ignites a hypnotic fuse counting down to her eventual breaking point. Bloodshed is kept to a minimum until the midway point, but once things start going south, they go south fast: A romance with a single-minded projectionist (David Corenswet) quickly goes awry, Pearl’s relationship with her parents comes to a head, and an ill-fated audition ends with inevitable heartbreak. There are murders, backbreaking tumbles, even coitus with a scarecrow, and Goth sells it all. And the cherry on top? An uninterrupted, six-minute monologue that burns the whole house down, plumbing the depths of Pearl’s rage, anxiety, and naïveté.
Pearl is the perfect companion piece to X, scratching an entirely different itch than its grimy predecessor. A technicolor nightmare anchored by the tragedy of the future, it’s a portrait of dreams bloodily dashed through fearless performance. Pearl is the rare prequel that effortlessly enriches what lies ahead, and by the time its final act rolls by with its bugnuts closing credits - holding on Mia Goth’s forced, delirious smirk that slowly warps into a rictus grin - you’ll be smiling, too.
