Pearl (15)

In 1918 Texas, teenager Pearl begrudgingly completes her chores to appease her domineering German immigrant mother Ruth. The pair have been isolated at Powder Kegs Farm for weeks to prevent the Spanish Flu from crossing the threshold and potentially dealing a fatal blow to Pearl's paralysed father. Pearl dreams of becoming a dancer in Hollywood. The projectionist of the local cinema fans the flames of the teenager's rebellion and mother and daughter clash violently.

LondonNet Film Review

Pearl (15) Film Review from LondonNet

There’s no place like an unhappy home. Director Ti West’s luxuriously overwrought prequel to his 2022 horror film X is a disorienting Technicolour fever dream that repeatedly refers to The Wizard Of Oz. Except here his Dorothy is mentally unstable, wilfully duplicitous and would prefer to greet Scarecrow, Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion with a blood-smeared axe than a wicker basket containing Toto…

Fittingly subtitled An X-traordinary Origin Story, Pearl cranks up the horror-saturated melodrama from its heavily stylised opening titles and initial deafening blasts of composers Tyler Bates and Tim Williams’ score. West sustains the queasy conflation of fantastical delirium and nauseating reality until the eponymous farm girl has relinquished her tenuous grasp on sanity. Goth delivers a jaw-dropping, powerhouse performance that skips fancifully between childlike delusion and psychopathic fury.

The piece de resistance is an incendiary soliloquy in which Pearl tearfully confides: “It seems like there’s something missing in me that the rest of the world has”, and fully reveals the malevolence festering in her guts to her sister-in-law Mitsy (Emma Jenkins-Purro). Filmed in unsettling close-up, the scene includes a six-minute monologue that refuses to cut away from Goth’s face as she discloses her diabolical sins. We’re certainly not in Kansas anymore. Instead we’re in 1918 Texas, almost 60 years before the nightmarish events of X.

Teenager Pearl (Goth) begrudgingly completes her chores to appease her domineering German immigrant mother Ruth (Tandi Wright). The pair have been isolated at Powder Kegs Farm for weeks to prevent the Spanish flu from crossing the threshold and potentially dealing a fatal blow to Pearl’s paralysed father (Matthew Sunderland). Pearl waits impatiently for her soldier husband Howard (Alistair Sewell) to return from The Great War so they can leave the state and realise her burning ambition of becoming a dancer. “Please Lord, make me the biggest star the world has ever known so that I may get far, far away from this place,” she prays.

During a rare excursion into town, Pearl encounters the projectionist (David Corenswet) from the local cinema and he fans the flames of the teenager’s rebellion. Mother and daughter clash, the former fearfully recognising the monster under her roof, who secretly kills farm animals with a pitchfork for pleasure.

Co-written by West and Goth, Pearl hangs entirely on a fearless central performance that conjures a tormented kindred spirit to Psycho’s Norman Bates. Motifs and themes from the first film, set in 1979, resonate more clearly once their origins are revealed, expanding a gore-slathered mythology that intends to conclude with a sequel to X entitled MaXXXine. At the end of The Wizard Of Oz, Dorothy dismisses her witch-slaying actions with a plaintive: “I didn’t mean to kill her. Really, I didn’t.” Pearl cannot say the same.

– Kim Hu