X factor
It's very easy to look at a movie and declare it "a labor of love" whether you actually know that to be the case or not, but for Pearl, there's no doubt about it. Literally the fact that it exists at all is the proof that it was a labor of love, and that co-writers Ti West (also the director, editor, and one of the producers) and Mia Goth (also the star, and one of the executive producers) cared deeply about making it. During the pre-production of X, which released earlier in 2022 and stars Goth as two characters, she and West got so excited talking about the backstory of one of those characters, the old and dotty sex-crazed murderer Pearl, that they transformed that backstory into a whole entire movie, and that whole entire movie was filmed immediately after X wrapped in March 2021, using most of the same production crew. It is the proverbial "story that had to be told", and there's no denying that the people telling that story are extremely invested in it. You can just feel the enthusiasm wafting off the screen.
Did it, in fact, have to be told? Probably not, though I'm not remotely sorry that it was. 61 years before X, in the late summer or early fall of 1918, we meet Pearl as a much younger woman, barely out of girlhood, though she's already married, to a man named Howard (Alistair Sewell, in the tiny bits of time we see the character). He's off fighting in the Great War, and Pearl has been stranded at her much-hated family farm in rural Texas, where she sullenly obeys the harsh commands of her mother, a cold German immigrant named Ruth (Tandi Wright). This not only involves operating the farm almost entirely just by the two of them - all the strapping young men are, of course, dying horribly in trenches in France - but also tending to Pearl's invalid and practically vegetative father (Matthew Sunderland). It's a horrible, bitter life, one that is only mitigated by Pearl's opportunities to sneak into movies when she runs errands in the nearest town, which is still a substantial bike ride away. With absolutely no outlet other than movies, Pearl has fixated on stardom as the one chance she'll ever have to get away from her day-to-day hell, and has as such been practicing dancing in front of the dwindling number of farm animals still in the family's possession.
That's already a situation with a good chance of boiling over, but just to really ramp up the tension: Pearl is also not right in the head, as she is aware and her mother is aware, though Ruth presumably doesn't realise just how not right. We get an inkling early on, during the introductory sequence, when Pearl's dance is interrupted by a goose entering the barn. She spears it with a pitchfork and feeds it to "Theda", the alligator who lives in the pond behind the farm - the film's title appears over a freeze-frame of the exact moment she does so. Which is one of the moments where Pearl reveals its stylistic limitations, which I almost feel like a petty nitpicking shit even to bring them up, since the film has style, tons of it, and that's not something one wants to treat dismissively these days. But the thing is, X had an extremely straightforward and immaculately-executed stylistic gimmick: it was the story of people shooting an exploitation film in the 1970s, and it has been made, in every detail of editing and sound design and cinematography and music, like an exploitation film from the 1970s. West clearly understands '70s exploitation at a molecular level, too.
Pearl, on the other hand, is sort of shot like a '50s melodrama (up to and including its widescreen anamorphic aspect ratio); it feels like somebody who has only seen one Douglas Sirk movie, and it was a few years ago, set themselves to making a Douglas Sirk movie. West has particularly name-dropped The Wizard of Oz, which I don't really see (though there's a memorable scene here involving a scarecrow), which I gather means that the "thing" here is meant to be that it looks like Technicolor, and by the standards of 2020s American cinema, it's closer to Technicolor than most things. I mean, it was very obviously color-designed, that alone puts it well above 50% of modern movies. I'm not going to diminish the work of colorist Damian McDonnell; Pearl is pretty striking to look at - it has, at least, been strongly over-saturated, giving all of the colors a certain radiant digital glow. It's not "Technicolor", but it at least gets to the idea of Technicolor, again, sort of like somebody who knows Sirk but isn't really versed in Sirk.
Why, precisely, one would want to reference a 1939 musical and 1950s filmmaking in telling the story of a film-obsessed psycho alive in 1918, that is not a question I can answer. Perhaps because '50s Technicolor is a cornerstone of "the magic of movies", insofar as '50s Technicolor is one of the crucial ingredients in '50s MGM musicals, and '50s MGM musicals are one of the central examples of Hollywood movies as lavish, fantastic spectacle. And that is the element of movies that Pearl is so obsessed with: the escapism, the fantasy, the defiant unreality. At one point, she's shown a French pornographic film by a projectionist (David Corenswet) at one point, who stands in for all the glamor of world travel and show business in her cramped imagination, and he unconvincingly tries to argue that porn matters because it's "real"; she absently counters that she already has more reality than she knows what to do with, and would prefer gaudy illusion. So it's not an inexplicable aesthetic, though it never feels anything other than random. And while I am certain from the evidence of the film that West enjoys classic movies (nobody who doesn't would have been so scrupulous about showing that Pearl's movie theater is playing the 1917 Cleopatra, one of the most sought-after of all now-lost silent films - Pearl doesn't go to see it - nor would they have named the alligator after Cleopatra's star Theda Bara, one of the major sex symbols of the 1910s), they don't appear to have intertwined themselves with his DNA the way that '70s exploitation did, to judge from X, or '80s junk food horror did, to judge from The House of the Devil. The stylistic pastiche here isn't natural, the way it's natural in those two films.
Absolutely none of the above should be construed as an argument that Pearl isn't worth watching. Even if it's not a perfect simulation of 1950s filmmaking, it's still a visually bold movie, particularly in Malgosia Turzanska's gorgeously run-down, old-fashioned costume designs, and their smart use of a limited color palette. And it's also a pretty captivating story, the portrait of a slasher killer told from her own point of view, and with an eye to exploring the emotional cost of being a slasher. Pearl is barely a horror film, and I'd say isn't horror at all anywhere in its first half, outside of the goose and a later scene where Pearl demonstrates her enthusiasm for destroying fragile, harmless small forms of life; but is a pretty fine psychological thriller about the mind of somebody who could, at any moment, transform the world around her into a horror film. The movie's clever play is to position its main character as both sympathetic and villainous without making her such a cliché as an "anti-hero". In essence, we are watching the story of disappointment and misery trickling down: Ruth is unhappy with her life and has developed a moral framework to justify it; because it is thus the moral thing, she forces that frame onto her daughter, and the arc of Pearl is primarily the question of whether Pearl will accept that frame ("life sucks and all you can do is cope with the shit you're given"), or if she will continue to cling to her dreams of leaving for something better. Since X exists, the answer to that question is pretty obvious, but Pearl is better than just being a prequel, and would I think largely function the same way if X had never been. It is the story about how being forced to suffer and told "suffering is your duty" pushes a young woman into violent madness.
The clever bit is that there's never any indication that the suffering causes Pearl's madness; being the kind of person who will, six decades later, murder an entire farmyard full of pornographers is positioned as something innate, something that exists before the start of this movie's story (the goose and alligator!), something that exists outside of the usual generational hand-me-downs of misery (since her mother is the only person who sees this madness and knows to be afraid of it). What we're seeing isn't a woman driven to madness, but a madwoman being deprived of the mental sandbags that kept her madness from flooding in. And the movie, of course, showcases her first horrific killing spree (a "spoiler", but again: X exists).
West and crew do a fine job of realising all of this, in its own special way - it is a film with very little onscreen, and also a film where the blood that we do get is pretty aggressive, and as I've already said, it's not really horror, though I don't know where else you'd file it - but this is, above all things, Mia Goth's movie. It was written to showcase her character work, so that's not a surprise exactly, but it is wonderful character work, and worthy of having a film built around it. The basic idea of Pearl is a delicate balancing act between sympathy and terror, showing off the character as an enthusiastic dreamer or a malicious creature who cannot grasp the fact that other people have emotions. And then above and beyond that, sometimes the darker, violent version of the character is trying to pretend to be the gentler version, largely by mimicking what she sees in the movies - and above and beyond that, the darker version is sometimes trying to force herself to become the gentler version, and Goth has to play those two things as different, and also as different from the rest of the characterisation. It generally adds layers and complexity as it goes along, until the best parts of the performance and therefore the film all come right at the end: an exemplary monologue, filmed in a static medium close-up, where Goth has to do all of the above, playing a character who is pitiable and relatable specifically because she is so unfathomably monstrous and is attempting to articulate her monstrosity in human language. And I would not dare to tell you what the final shot is, or how it plays out, except to say that A) it is situated into the structure of the film in a surprising and viscerally upsetting way that made me want to leap for joy when it happened, and B) it is an endurance test for Goth that I can't even imagine, asking her to do things with her face that I am 100% confident I would not be able to do, and gradually modulate those things over a ridiculously long stretch of time. It's a rare example a movie that ends on easily its best moment, the beat where the entire project of the film suddenly snaps into perfect focus, and even if Pearl hadn't already been a fascinatingly arch aesthetic object and weird anti-genre film, the last ten minutes would be all I'd need to declare this essential viewing.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
Did it, in fact, have to be told? Probably not, though I'm not remotely sorry that it was. 61 years before X, in the late summer or early fall of 1918, we meet Pearl as a much younger woman, barely out of girlhood, though she's already married, to a man named Howard (Alistair Sewell, in the tiny bits of time we see the character). He's off fighting in the Great War, and Pearl has been stranded at her much-hated family farm in rural Texas, where she sullenly obeys the harsh commands of her mother, a cold German immigrant named Ruth (Tandi Wright). This not only involves operating the farm almost entirely just by the two of them - all the strapping young men are, of course, dying horribly in trenches in France - but also tending to Pearl's invalid and practically vegetative father (Matthew Sunderland). It's a horrible, bitter life, one that is only mitigated by Pearl's opportunities to sneak into movies when she runs errands in the nearest town, which is still a substantial bike ride away. With absolutely no outlet other than movies, Pearl has fixated on stardom as the one chance she'll ever have to get away from her day-to-day hell, and has as such been practicing dancing in front of the dwindling number of farm animals still in the family's possession.
That's already a situation with a good chance of boiling over, but just to really ramp up the tension: Pearl is also not right in the head, as she is aware and her mother is aware, though Ruth presumably doesn't realise just how not right. We get an inkling early on, during the introductory sequence, when Pearl's dance is interrupted by a goose entering the barn. She spears it with a pitchfork and feeds it to "Theda", the alligator who lives in the pond behind the farm - the film's title appears over a freeze-frame of the exact moment she does so. Which is one of the moments where Pearl reveals its stylistic limitations, which I almost feel like a petty nitpicking shit even to bring them up, since the film has style, tons of it, and that's not something one wants to treat dismissively these days. But the thing is, X had an extremely straightforward and immaculately-executed stylistic gimmick: it was the story of people shooting an exploitation film in the 1970s, and it has been made, in every detail of editing and sound design and cinematography and music, like an exploitation film from the 1970s. West clearly understands '70s exploitation at a molecular level, too.
Pearl, on the other hand, is sort of shot like a '50s melodrama (up to and including its widescreen anamorphic aspect ratio); it feels like somebody who has only seen one Douglas Sirk movie, and it was a few years ago, set themselves to making a Douglas Sirk movie. West has particularly name-dropped The Wizard of Oz, which I don't really see (though there's a memorable scene here involving a scarecrow), which I gather means that the "thing" here is meant to be that it looks like Technicolor, and by the standards of 2020s American cinema, it's closer to Technicolor than most things. I mean, it was very obviously color-designed, that alone puts it well above 50% of modern movies. I'm not going to diminish the work of colorist Damian McDonnell; Pearl is pretty striking to look at - it has, at least, been strongly over-saturated, giving all of the colors a certain radiant digital glow. It's not "Technicolor", but it at least gets to the idea of Technicolor, again, sort of like somebody who knows Sirk but isn't really versed in Sirk.
Why, precisely, one would want to reference a 1939 musical and 1950s filmmaking in telling the story of a film-obsessed psycho alive in 1918, that is not a question I can answer. Perhaps because '50s Technicolor is a cornerstone of "the magic of movies", insofar as '50s Technicolor is one of the crucial ingredients in '50s MGM musicals, and '50s MGM musicals are one of the central examples of Hollywood movies as lavish, fantastic spectacle. And that is the element of movies that Pearl is so obsessed with: the escapism, the fantasy, the defiant unreality. At one point, she's shown a French pornographic film by a projectionist (David Corenswet) at one point, who stands in for all the glamor of world travel and show business in her cramped imagination, and he unconvincingly tries to argue that porn matters because it's "real"; she absently counters that she already has more reality than she knows what to do with, and would prefer gaudy illusion. So it's not an inexplicable aesthetic, though it never feels anything other than random. And while I am certain from the evidence of the film that West enjoys classic movies (nobody who doesn't would have been so scrupulous about showing that Pearl's movie theater is playing the 1917 Cleopatra, one of the most sought-after of all now-lost silent films - Pearl doesn't go to see it - nor would they have named the alligator after Cleopatra's star Theda Bara, one of the major sex symbols of the 1910s), they don't appear to have intertwined themselves with his DNA the way that '70s exploitation did, to judge from X, or '80s junk food horror did, to judge from The House of the Devil. The stylistic pastiche here isn't natural, the way it's natural in those two films.
Absolutely none of the above should be construed as an argument that Pearl isn't worth watching. Even if it's not a perfect simulation of 1950s filmmaking, it's still a visually bold movie, particularly in Malgosia Turzanska's gorgeously run-down, old-fashioned costume designs, and their smart use of a limited color palette. And it's also a pretty captivating story, the portrait of a slasher killer told from her own point of view, and with an eye to exploring the emotional cost of being a slasher. Pearl is barely a horror film, and I'd say isn't horror at all anywhere in its first half, outside of the goose and a later scene where Pearl demonstrates her enthusiasm for destroying fragile, harmless small forms of life; but is a pretty fine psychological thriller about the mind of somebody who could, at any moment, transform the world around her into a horror film. The movie's clever play is to position its main character as both sympathetic and villainous without making her such a cliché as an "anti-hero". In essence, we are watching the story of disappointment and misery trickling down: Ruth is unhappy with her life and has developed a moral framework to justify it; because it is thus the moral thing, she forces that frame onto her daughter, and the arc of Pearl is primarily the question of whether Pearl will accept that frame ("life sucks and all you can do is cope with the shit you're given"), or if she will continue to cling to her dreams of leaving for something better. Since X exists, the answer to that question is pretty obvious, but Pearl is better than just being a prequel, and would I think largely function the same way if X had never been. It is the story about how being forced to suffer and told "suffering is your duty" pushes a young woman into violent madness.
The clever bit is that there's never any indication that the suffering causes Pearl's madness; being the kind of person who will, six decades later, murder an entire farmyard full of pornographers is positioned as something innate, something that exists before the start of this movie's story (the goose and alligator!), something that exists outside of the usual generational hand-me-downs of misery (since her mother is the only person who sees this madness and knows to be afraid of it). What we're seeing isn't a woman driven to madness, but a madwoman being deprived of the mental sandbags that kept her madness from flooding in. And the movie, of course, showcases her first horrific killing spree (a "spoiler", but again: X exists).
West and crew do a fine job of realising all of this, in its own special way - it is a film with very little onscreen, and also a film where the blood that we do get is pretty aggressive, and as I've already said, it's not really horror, though I don't know where else you'd file it - but this is, above all things, Mia Goth's movie. It was written to showcase her character work, so that's not a surprise exactly, but it is wonderful character work, and worthy of having a film built around it. The basic idea of Pearl is a delicate balancing act between sympathy and terror, showing off the character as an enthusiastic dreamer or a malicious creature who cannot grasp the fact that other people have emotions. And then above and beyond that, sometimes the darker, violent version of the character is trying to pretend to be the gentler version, largely by mimicking what she sees in the movies - and above and beyond that, the darker version is sometimes trying to force herself to become the gentler version, and Goth has to play those two things as different, and also as different from the rest of the characterisation. It generally adds layers and complexity as it goes along, until the best parts of the performance and therefore the film all come right at the end: an exemplary monologue, filmed in a static medium close-up, where Goth has to do all of the above, playing a character who is pitiable and relatable specifically because she is so unfathomably monstrous and is attempting to articulate her monstrosity in human language. And I would not dare to tell you what the final shot is, or how it plays out, except to say that A) it is situated into the structure of the film in a surprising and viscerally upsetting way that made me want to leap for joy when it happened, and B) it is an endurance test for Goth that I can't even imagine, asking her to do things with her face that I am 100% confident I would not be able to do, and gradually modulate those things over a ridiculously long stretch of time. It's a rare example a movie that ends on easily its best moment, the beat where the entire project of the film suddenly snaps into perfect focus, and even if Pearl hadn't already been a fascinatingly arch aesthetic object and weird anti-genre film, the last ten minutes would be all I'd need to declare this essential viewing.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
