Pearl – first-look review

Pearl (Mia Goth) wants to be a star. It’s all she’s ever dreamed of, but it’s a mil­lion miles away from the life she seems doomed to lead, on a rur­al farm where her miser­ly Ger­man moth­er (Tan­di Wright) makes her work hard look­ing after their small col­lec­tion of ani­mals, as well as her dis­abled father (Matthew Sun­der­land) who is paral­ysed and con­fined to a wheel­chair. Her moth­er has no time for Pearl’s day­dream­ing, least of all while there’s a war going on, and dis­cour­ages Pearl’s flights of fan­cy at every opportunity.

Her clos­est friends are the farm­yard crit­ters she’s named after her favourite movie stars – and The­da, the croc­o­dile who lives in the swamp behind their house – and Pearl per­forms her dance rou­tines for them when her moth­er isn’t watch­ing. She’s also friends with Mit­sy (Emma Jenk­ins-Purro), the sis­ter of her hus­band Howard, who’s cur­rent­ly away serv­ing in World War One, and sweet Mit­sy encour­ages Pearl’s ambi­tion, as does John­ny (David Corenswet) the pro­jec­tion­ist at the local pic­ture­house who meets Pearl after a screen­ing of Palace Follies.

It’s John­ny who intro­duces Pearl to stag films, call­ing back to Ti West’s X, which inspired this pre­quel (which Mia Goth co-wrote with West) but her inter­est remains stead­fast­ly in danc­ing on the stage or screen, and an upcom­ing audi­tion presents Pearl with an oppor­tu­ni­ty. She’s not about to let any­thing – or any­one – stand in her way. To Goth’s cred­it, she gives a spir­it­ed, com­mit­ted per­for­mance as Pearl, which isn’t easy con­sid­er­ing the char­ac­ter is pre­sent­ed sole­ly as ​‘delud­ed’ with no deep­er char­ac­ter­is­tics beyond her ambi­tion and jeal­ousy. Instead West is more inter­est­ed in gags like Pearl sim­u­lat­ing sex with a scare­crow or mak­ing Covid ref­er­ences dis­guised as men­tions of the 1918 influen­za pandemic.

There are engag­ing moments, such as Goth’s deliv­ery of an unhinged mono­logue in which the cam­era focus­es total­ly on her face, and the film’s final shot rais­es a smile, but West is prov­ing to be a film­mak­er who real­ly likes to lead his audi­ences down the prover­bial gar­den path; it takes a long time to get to any of the action. When it does come, the same tricks are large­ly repeat­ed from X, which is a lit­tle under­whelm­ing, and while that film was stacked with ref­er­ences to the films of the 1970s (in par­tic­u­lar the bur­geon­ing porn indus­try) Pearl pays homage to the likes of Cecil B. DeMille and George Cukor, while shoot­ing in vivid tech­ni­colour that’s more reminscent of Vic­tor Fleming’s The Wiz­ard of Oz. Giv­en the 1918 set­ting that doesn’t quite make sense, but West is more about aes­thet­ics than ful­ly-formed ideas.

Although billed as a pre­quel to X, Pearl only real­ly cov­ers the begin­ning of the anti-heroine’s sto­ry – we don’t real­ly learn how she came to be the bit­ter, twist­ed old woman who offs sev­er­al sexy young folk, or why on earth her hus­band stayed with her all those years. But those who found some­thing to like in the strange­ly sex-neg­a­tive X might get some­thing out of this. Or you could just watch an actu­al­ly good film about ambi­tion and obses­sion (Sun­set Boule­vard! What­ev­er Hap­pened to Baby Jane!) instead.