Studio:     A24
Director:    Ti West
Writer:     Ti West, Mia Goth
Producer: Kevin Turen, Harrison Kreiss, Jacob Jaffke, Ti West
Stars:     Mia Goth, David Corenswet, Tandi Wright, Matthew Sunderland, Emma Jenkins-Purro

Review Score:

Summary:

In 1918, a psychologically disturbed woman with dreams of escaping to stardom confronts the macabre realities of a suffocating life on her family’s farm.

Synopsis:

Feeling choked by life on a family farm where she must help her domineering and verbally abusive German mother Ruth care for her invalid father, Pearl regularly fantasizes about escaping to a life of stardom as a dancer in movies. Pearl also harbors disturbing urges that often manifest as violent actions, such as spontaneously killing a goose with a pitchfork and feeding it to a crocodile in a pond on the property.

Pearl rides her bicycle to the movie theater in town to see a film featuring chorus girls. Afterward, Pearl meets the theater’s flirtatious projectionist, who charms Pearl by encouraging her pursuit of silver screen fame. Although enamored, Pearl mentions she has a husband, Howard, who is currently overseas serving in the military. The projectionist still gives Pearl a frame cut from the film she just saw and invites her to return anytime.

The film frame flies into a cornfield during Pearl’s bike ride home. Pearl searches for it in a clearing where she becomes entranced by a scarecrow. Although she angrily shouts that she is married at first, Pearl imagines the scarecrow is the projectionist and uses it to pleasure herself.

Howard’s sister Mitsy and prosperous mother Margaret visit the farm. Ruth refuses Margaret’s gift of a cooked pig because she views it as charity. Meanwhile, Mitsy tells Pearl about a touring chorus line that will be holding local auditions, which Pearl sees as the opportunity she has been waiting for.

Pearl sneaks out during the night to return to the movie theater. Pearl tells the projectionist about the audition as he continues encouraging her pursuit of stardom. He also shows Pearl a pornographic film that inspires a conversation about facing reality versus chasing dreams. Pearl idly mentions her life would be easier if her parents would die.

The next day, Pearl contemplates feeding her wheelchair-bound father to the crocodile while musing about how her husband Howard promised to take her away and how it would be easier to leave if she didn’t feel like she was abandoning her mute dad. Ruth interrupts Pearl before she can push the wheelchair off the pier. Pearl later imagines her husband exploding while crushing an egg in her hand.

Having discovered that she sneaked away to see a movie, Ruth demands that Pearl stay in the bunkhouse during a storm to quarantine due to the ongoing pandemic. Pearl defiantly tells her mother that she is going to the dance audition to find out if she is good enough to have a better life than her current one. Ruth promises that Pearl will fail, and also hints that she knows about Pearl’s true nature.

An intense argument erupts between the two women about having had to sacrifice their personal desires for burdensome husbands. A physical fight ensues. In the struggle, Ruth’s dress inadvertently catches fire, which causes her body to go up in flames. Initially shocked, Pearl douses Ruth with water, but then drags her charred body into the cellar and locks her inside. Despite his paralysis, Pearl’s father continues staring at his daughter in helpless horror.

Pearl races to the movie theater where she ends up sleeping with the projectionist. In the morning, Pearl wakes from a dream of performing in front of her adoring family, which includes Ruth wearing a deformed face beneath her pandemic mask.

The projectionist drives Pearl back home where he notices the pig Ruth refused collecting maggots on the porch. After privately apologizing to her father for leaving him at the table, Pearl introduces him to the projectionist. Pearl and the projectionist then go to her bedroom where they begin making out, but they become distracted by Ruth thumping in the cellar, which Pearl tries passing off as a dog.

The projectionist realizes Pearl might be mentally unwell after she introduces individual barnyard animals and he catches her in a lie about the dog. The projectionist moves to leave, which causes Pearl to scream at him about rejecting her and leaving her on the farm. The projectionist tries driving away, but Pearl stabs him to death with a pitchfork and puts his body and car in the pond.

Pearl kicks Ruth back down into the cellar when she tries crawling out. Pearl then suffocates her father. Ruth dies.

Pearl meets Mitsy at the dance audition. Pearl insists she must be the person picked from this town to go out on the road. Pearl imagines a spectacular musical number while performing, but the judges tell her no. Envisioning the judges as her disapproving family, Pearl screams she is a star and begs for help while having a devastating breakdown on stage.

Mitsy takes Pearl home. Pearl openly muses that her mother was right about never leaving the farm, and that something may be wrong with her. To help Pearl cope, Mitsy roleplays as Howard, which inspires Pearl to reveal her infidelity while confessing she feels frustrated by her marriage. Mitsy grows increasingly worried as she sees Pearl become tearful and aggressive.

At Pearl’s repeated insistence that Mitsy tell her the truth she supposedly already knows, Mitsy claims she was the person picked by the dance judges. Pearl angrily accuses Mitsy of getting everything she wants. Uncomfortable with the change in mood, Mitsy tries to leave, but Pearl chases her with an ax and hacks apart Mitsy’s body.

Accepting that her life is no longer about what she wants, but about making the best out of what she has, Pearl’s fractured family fantasy compels her to arrange her mother and father’s corpses around the dinner table with the maggot-riddled pig in the middle. Howard returns home to find the macabre milieu in the dining room. While Howard stares in shocked disbelief, Pearl welcomes him with a beaming smile that gradually turns into another tearful breakdown.

Review:

Although it landed on a few lists of 2022’s best horror movies, I felt Ti West’s “X” (review here) was merely a mediocre slasher missing outstanding oomph. Being a longtime fan of West’s films, this frustrated me. I really wanted to see what others thought was so special in something I only found to be ordinary.

Now that I’ve seen “Pearl,” West’s follow-up prequel that serves as an offshoot origin for “X’s” killer, I once again wish I’d appreciated the first film the way its admirers do. Because as much as I enjoyed “Pearl,” I think its uniquely weird flavor would have hit my tongue even harder if I didn’t have “X’s” plain taste already in my mouth beforehand.

“Pearl” shouldn’t work as well as it does for a number of reasons. The first has to do with how the project came to be. When West and company went to New Zealand to shoot “X” in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, they had to quarantine in their hotel for two weeks first. West and Mia Goth, who plays the title character, passed part of that time by trading musings about Pearl’s background. That turned into the two of them hammering out an entire script based on what they imagined for Pearl’s life prior to events in “X.” Looking to get the most economical use out of stages that had already been built, West then went to A24 with a pitch that convinced them to make a second movie before they’d even filmed a single frame of the first. Shot in secret after “X” was in the can, “Pearl” basically went from initial idea to production wrap in a matter of mere weeks.

A cynic could justifiably consider “Pearl” to be a bit of a lark built out of boredom, improvisation, and serendipity as opposed to being from a carefully planned blueprint for a multilayered feature. Someone else could then counter that West and Goth nevertheless happened to harness a little lucky lightning out of circumstance, spontaneity, and streams of consciousness.

Set in 1918, and lensed to look like a vibrant musical from Hollywood’s Golden Age, “Pearl’s” various palettes, from visual hues to overarching themes, parallel “The Wizard of Oz,” if Dorothy took to humping the Scarecrow while he was still inanimate. Initially, “Pearl’s” buoyant colors and artificial building facades come off as too fake. Quickly, however, that atmosphere of cheery exteriors painted over dark interiors comes to precisely mirror the war being waged within Pearl. While not cartoonish, “Pearl’s” slightly exaggerated fantasy setting tinges the tale with dreaminess, then nightmarishness, that lends itself well to the movie’s unusual texture.

A character study through and through, yet one whose vast vistas make it feel wide open instead of like a stuffy theater drama, “Pearl” peels, picks, and pokes at a person perhaps destined, or doomed, to become a serial killer due to nature as well as nurture. Sending strong Mother Superior from “Silent Night, Deadly Night” (review here) vibes, Pearl’s abusive German mother runs a tight ship on their family’s farm. While her husband Howard fights in the war overseas, Pearl hopelessly helps out at the house by tending to barnyard animals, following mama’s orders, and caring for her catatonic father. It’s no wonder Pearl yearns to escape to a more promising life, and she fuels those desires with trips to the movies where she can fantasize about becoming a chorus girl the way some kids consider running away to the circus.

Pearl has a couple of prospects. The local theater’s projectionist takes an interest in Pearl. She’s a little naïve to his overtly salacious intimations, maybe, although it’s equally likely her marriage is the only thing stopping her from reciprocating his sexually suggestive advances. Pearl’s sister-in-law also has the scoop on an upcoming audition to join a traveling troupe of dancers. Mama would never allow such nonsense, but Pearl thinks this could be the break she’s been longing for.

Flights of fancy and harsh realities soon collide in ways Pearl’s mind isn’t equipped for handling. Instead, Pearl handles her problems with pitchforks, axes, and by regressing further inside the fractured family fantasy she’s created in order to be compliant and complacent. Horror hounds may not get gore or gruesomeness in amounts equal to “X.” In place of plentiful visceral thrills, they witness something more shocking: the terrifying transformation of an everyday nobody who becomes psychologically broken by broken dreams.

“Pearl” may move even more slowly than “X,” though it moves deliberately, with poignant ponderings aimed at stimulating the psyche. “X” hid some of these musings under the appearance of a standard slasher, except “X” barely scratched the skin compared to where “Pearl” takes similar ideas related to the conception of Pearl’s personality. Rather than rely mostly on murder to make its mood macabre, “Pearl” wrings tension out of long takes, shouting matches, and impassioned monologues. Such scenes are so heartbreakingly relatable in addition to being horrifying that “Pearl” becomes, surprisingly, an emotionally rich vicarious experience, which is something seldom seen in horror cinema.

As said earlier, “Pearl” shouldn’t work for a number of reasons, mostly related to its hurried genesis. In a certain light, it may not work well at all. Oddly enough, that light is as a companion piece to “X,” which “Pearl” was expressly created to be.

From a cinephile’s perspective, it’s intriguing that the two films are disparate in tone and narrative purpose. Yet it’s concurrently distracting that “Pearl” retroactively sets up a comparatively routine story, and one that’s not nearly as interesting or as focused as the one told here. That natural link primes “Pearl” as a seemingly ideal pairing with “X” as a double feature, although I’m not so sure. I have no desire to revisit the two movies in chronological order, but my memory of “X” assures me that its slightness may feel even weaker in light of the engaging depths “Pearl” plumbs.

Review Score: 80