The Scare Salon

This sounds like a bonkers premise for a horror film on paper, but damn if it didn’t work like gangbusters in execution, leading some critics to call Pearl one of the best films—not just horror films—of the year, an opinion I have no disagreement with whatsoever.

Anyone familiar with X will know that Pearl was the elderly villain of the piece: the bitter, sexually frustrated old woman who viciously murdered younger people out of jealousy and hatred. Mia Goth played the elder Pearl in X, under such impressive makeup that you could be forgiven for not realizing it was her, as well as playing the young lead, Maxine Minx, who while a different character to Pearl, is sort of a mirror of her. The third film in the franchise, incidentally, will be released about a month from when I’m writing this; titled MaXXXine, it will focus on the character from X a few years after the events of that movie (which took place in 1979).

Pearl, then, tells us the origin story of the murderous woman from X, and delves into the psychological and environmental factors that may have made her the way she was. While the movie obviously won’t hold many surprises for anyone who’s seen X—we know Pearl is destined to become a killer and we know she survived into old age, for example—the prequel wisely focuses more on being a strikingly emotional (as well as brutal) character study of the woman herself, exploring the dark recesses of her mind and the tragic outcome of a nature/nurture dynamic that went wrong in so many ways.

It must be said that the beating heart of the story is the completely astonishing central performance of Mia Goth, who gives a legitimately award-worthy turn as the titular character and absolutely should have gotten an Oscar nod. It’s too bad, in this day and age, that Oscar voters are still so reluctant to recognize actors for their work in horror, which in my opinion is one of, if not THE, most difficult genre to work in. I’m still pretty salty, in fact, that Toni Collette didn’t even get a nomination for Hereditary back in 2018. The same thing applies here, in spades. Mia Goth is just magnificent, walking a delicate tightrope between the naïve, star-struck farm girl who longs for greater things, and the psychotic, violent monster who can’t regulate her feelings and lashes out savagely when things don’t go her way.

Much of the tragedy of her character—which is conveyed impeccably in an amazing, seven-minute monologue in which Mia Goth displays an entire spectrum of emotions with raw, organic perfection—derives from the fact that Pearl has only ever wanted love, and an escape from her humdrum existence; to be someone special, in other words. But she’s also keenly aware that something is deeply, horribly wrong with her; she’s not like other people, although she desperately longs to be, and she is becoming increasingly distraught as she realizes that her family and friends are terrified of her. She is, however, powerless to fight the escalating madness no matter how much she struggles to fit in and make her mark on the world.

Since I mentioned THAT monologue, allow me in passing to also bring up that fantastic shot under the end credits, where we just sit and stare at Mia Goth’s face as her unsettling, teary-eyed smile grows wider and more unhinged with each passing second. It’s a sensational sequence.

The movie is set in 1918, using the backdrops of the First World War and the “Spanish” flu pandemic to great thematic effect. Pearl lives on a farm (in fact the same farm she still lives on in X) with her parents: her mother (Tandi Wright) is a stern, emotionally cold German woman who has no time for nonsense and gave up her own dreams long ago in order to buckle down into the practical drudgeries of her life. Pearl’s father (Matthew Sunderland), it’s implied, has been ravaged by the pandemic, and now languishes, motionless and never speaking, in a wheelchair. Pearl clearly loves her father, though perhaps resents having to help care for him, but not surprisingly, she and her mother are constantly at loggerheads, as Mom has no time at all for Pearl’s constant daydreams about becoming a star of the silver screen. She tells her daughter at one point that Pearl will never be happy until she focuses less on what she selfishly wants for herself and more on making the most of what she has. While there may be some truth in that sentiment, it’s also the case that Mom is not really the first person I’d go to for advice on happiness, because she’s essentially a sour old bag who uses her suffering like a cudgel to belittle her daughter’s aspirations.

Pearl is married to a young man named Howard (the same husband she has in X, though played here by Alistair Sewell) who is away fighting on the front lines. Pearl seems to have a complicated relationship with her absent spouse, missing the emotional connection and physical intimacy on the one hand, while at the same time hating him for leaving her and sometimes wishing he’d be killed in battle so she can be free of both him and the farm. There’s one striking scene in the film when Pearl steals one of the eggs from the local alligator’s nest (this is Theda, presumably the same alligator from X; they can live a long time, after all), then crushes it in her hand while imagining her husband exploding while he’s returning home to the farm.

At the beginning of the movie, we feel a sympathetic affinity with Pearl; she seems charming if a little awkward and “off,” and we can relate to her fantasies about rising above her humble origins and becoming someone bigger than life. But even from the jump, it’s obvious that the girl isn’t right; she stabs a blameless goose to death with a pitchfork and throws it to the alligator, for instance, and while her ambitions to stardom are understandable and even endearing, they also stray a bit too close to delusional.

Early on, Pearl rides her bike to town to pick up her father’s medicine and goes to the movies, a secret pleasure she indulges in every time she’s asked to run errands. After the movie, she meets the handsome young projectionist (David Corenswet), who she will eventually become more involved with and who later shows her some stag films (a nod to the porn angle in X).

Pearl also has a seemingly close relationship with her sister-in-law Mitsy (Emma Jenkins-Purro), though she bears some resentment there as well, as Mitsy has wealthy parents and is a young, pretty blonde who has things come much easier to her than they do to Pearl, at least from Pearl’s perspective.

It’s Mitsy, in fact, who tells Pearl about a dance audition being held at the church; they’re putting together a troupe, she says, that will tour around the state for the holidays. Pearl latches onto this opportunity as her potential big break, building it up in her mind as the one thing that’s going to get her off the farm and launch her into the fame she so richly deserves. Of course, her mother forbids her from going, thinking it’s a ridiculous waste of time and cruelly telling Pearl that she’ll fail, but Pearl is bound and determined that she’s going to be a star, and no one is going to stop her.

Well, since we know how Pearl ends up, it’s no spoiler to say that things don’t go the way she planned, and along the way, she causes a disgraceful amount of carnage, yet remains stubbornly human the entire way through. We don’t condone her appalling actions, of course, but we understand them; we understand her, and how someone like her could wind up in this dark place. It’s a testament to Mia Goth’s acting that she still retains the audience’s compassion in spite of the monumentally fucked up things she does.

Pearl is a very different movie than X; whereas the latter is a smart slasher homage, Pearl is more psychological, character-based horror, and is all the more layered and emotionally devastating for it. The films shine on their own merits, but also complement each other perfectly, in spite of their wildly divergent styles and influences.

While it isn’t as over-the-top gory as X, Pearl does have some gruesome scenes in the third act, including what I think might be the most realistic, close-up beheading I’ve ever seen in a film. But the big draw here is Pearl herself, the whole heartbreaking entirety of her as she spirals into a tragic, slippery insanity she can’t overcome, despite her tenacity.

In case you couldn’t tell, I loved every single frame of this film, and what’s more, it made me love X even more in light of its revelations about Pearl as a character. I’m now even more pumped for MaXXXine to come out, so look for a review of that in a month or two. If Ti West and Mia Goth can hit that third film out of the park, we might just have that very rare treat of a horror trilogy in which every film in the series is utterly brilliant, while still being its own distinct story. What a time to be alive.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.