Pearl

Dur­ing the twi­light era of her screen career, Hol­ly­wood grande dame Joan Craw­ford found her­self star­ring in a run of deli­cious low-rent hor­ror movies, most notable of which were William Castle’s Straight-Jack­et from 1964 and Jim O’Connolly Berserk! from 1967. Gone were the airs, graces and sense of walk-between-the-rain­drops untouch­a­bil­i­ty that came with the plush melo­dra­mas from which she made her name, and in their place came axes, blood and lots and lots of anguished yelling. And it worked surpis­ing­ly well!

Ti West’s Pearl, which serves as a clever pre­quel to his more straight-laced 2022 retro slash­er, X, oper­ates as an homage to the idea that, when you’re aspi­ra­tions towards glam­our, politesse and cre­ativ­i­ty are met with a cold shrug, then there’s real­ly noth­ing left to do but orgas­mi­cal­ly blud­geon a goose. It’s hard to talk about Pearl with­out spoil­ing X, but essen­tial­ly we trace back the lin­eage of a char­ac­ter played by Mia Goth (for which she did her best pros­thet­ic-heavy Til­da Swin­ton impres­sion) from the 1970s back to 1918 where she frol­icks and day­dreams her days away on an idyl­lic fam­i­ly farm.

Pearl’s inno­cent desire to up sticks and break for the big time cause her Ger­man moth­er (Tan­di Wright) to pile on the abus­es, while her inca­pac­i­tat­ed father (Matthew Sun­der­land) looks on with­out any recourse to stem the mad­ness. A trip to the cin­e­ma where she sees a bur­lesque one-reel­er of high-kick­ing dancers fuels her desire for inde­pen­dence from the clasps of oppres­sive fam­i­ly life, and the local smooth-talk­ing pro­jec­tion­ist (David Corenswet) is more than hap­py to take advan­tage of this wide-eyed dreamer.

Though West and his col­lab­o­ra­tors have attempt­ed to emu­late the kitsch, Tech­ni­colour aes­thet­ic of mid-cen­tu­ry melos on a shoe­string, there are strong links to the polit­i­cal present too, as the sto­ry takes place dur­ing a Span­ish flu epi­dem­ic with char­ac­ters occa­sion­al­ly forced to don sur­gi­cal masks. The script is more overt­ly lit­er­ary than one might expect from a terse genre work­out, with the film’s palm-sweat­ing finale com­pris­ing a breath­tak­ing, ever-inten­si­fy­ing mono­logue, exact­ing­ly deliv­ered by Goth, in which she sub­tly errs back and forth in her devlish desire to dou­ble down on the destruc­tion she’s already met­ed out on var­i­ous peo­ple in her orbit.

At the end of the day, Pearl is a film which will live or die on your tol­er­ance for Goth’s nitro-pow­ered per­for­mance, in which she plays a char­ac­ter who only projects in extremes. The cal­cu­lat­ed­ly ric­tus smile she wears dur­ing a failed dance audi­tion flips on a dime into a roof-pan­el-shak­ing pri­mal scream.

The iso­la­tion of the farm offers a pri­vate out­let for her rage-outs, which includes mul­ti­ple gory mur­ders. The mech­a­nism of her hus­band hav­ing left to fight in the war, and the ques­tion of his return, oper­ates as a cat­a­lyst for her trau­ma, and the film arrives at a punch­line which tra­vers­es the spec­trum of the sick­ly fun­ny to the qui­et­ly heart­break­ing. It’s a strange and beguil­ing film, and I’m just going to lay down my cards and say that, on the back of her all-in col­lab­o­ra­tions with Lars von Tri­er and Claire Denis, Goth’s pres­ence makes any movie a must-see.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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