Pearl

I’ve seen enough of Ti West’s movies to know two things: he loves to do homages that stand what he is paying homage to on its head, and he loves to slow burn. Movies like The Innkeepers and House Of The Devil didn’t quite know how to balance that, burning a little too slowly and then becoming an inferno. With X, West managed to balance the two ends, but one could argue doing so in the slasher genre is almost akin to a cheat code. Slashers, by design, typically backload the action anyway, so West had a long runway built in with which to make a slasher art house movie. I still think X is a legitimate fantastic film — not just a fun slasher film, but an actual, honest to God EXCELLENT MOVIE — but it did feel less like cracking a code he’d been working on and more like hitting a homer off a tee. With Pearl, he has vindicated himself. He didn’t need the slasher genre to pull off slow building tension and pay it off right. Yes, Pearl does dip its toes into slasher elements, as this is a prequel about the killer from X, but it isn’t a slasher movie any more than Fatal Attraction or Basic Instinct is. This is a character study of a desperate young woman’s descent into sad madness, a suspense movie, and a glorious, funhouse mirror homage to classic technicolor Hollywood. That last part is evidenced by the way this movie is filmed, acted, and scored. It all feels like the grand, cinematic epics of the 1930’s and 40’s (even though the movie takes place in 1918). Colors are bright, the sky and the scenery are almost characters in their own right, and the drama is just that right touch of melo. X might feel more like a lost 70’s movie than this does a lost 40’s movie, but the fact that West is so able to ape the feeling without feeling derivative or reductive is amazing. And the fact that West could do this so convincingly after he made X feel like a lost Tobe Hooper movie is equally impressive. You will get lost in the world and the drama of Pearl effortlessly. The world will pull you in. The music, the sights, everything will draw you like a magnet. And holding that magnet is Mia Goth. X was an ensemble, even if Mia’s Maxine was the final girl. Pearl is unequivocally her movie. Pearl is young, married to a man fighting in WW1, and stuck on a farm helping her harsh German mother take care of it and her infirm father. She dreams of being a dancer in the movies. She resents her mother’s strict, almost dictatorial hold on her. She is lonely and longs for the affection of a man fighting in a war overseas. With all these pressures, and desperate to realize her dreams, she begins to crack, and Mia Goth’s performance is a sight to behold. She manages to make Pearl sweet, pathetic, driven, sympathetic, dark, heartbreaking, and finally, psychotic. Often in the same scene. When she pours her heart out in a monologue near the end, you can almost feel where the clip should be for the Oscar submission. I know it won’t, because Oscar hates anything even horror-adjacent, but if it didn’t have its head up its ass, it would recognize this. You don’t see this kind of character development anywhere else. And yes, there’s murder. But unlike X, it doesn’t treat the murders as the natural consequence of horror tropes. They are the moment the dam finally bursts in Pearl, when all the quiet resentments that have been building finally scream aloud in uncontrollable rage. And it’s followed by one of the most powerful scenes I’ve seen in a movie. I won’t spoil it, but I will say this movie will have you ping-ponging through different emotions and it’ll all feel earned. I could gush about this movie for a few thousand words. I expected it to be good, but not this good. This is another level. I’m going to stop now and just say go see the damned movie already.