Halloween Horror: Pearl (2022)

Pearl is a performance-driven film, a rarity in the horror genre. So much so, that it’s almost a shame the film is horror—a shame for the actors, that is. If Mia Goth were putting on this kind of performance in a biopic or an addiction drama or a political epic, you’d assume she’d be in the heart of awards contention. But a horror movie where faces are stabbed with pitchforks and limbs cut off with axes is a bit of a tougher sell for industry awards pundits. Oh well. While Goth might not get her due come awards season, she still gives a great performance in a disturbing, surprisingly affecting movie that is technically a prequel to X, but as far from empty franchise extension as films are likely to get these days.

The story behind the film’s production is almost as intriguing as what we get on screen. While filming X, Ti West and Mia Goth began to write the screenplay, mostly as an acting exercise to work out the backstory of Pearl, the villain of that film. But when X finished filming in New Zealand and the COVID-19 pandemic hit, production in most parts of the world were shut down. So West and his crew stayed in New Zealand, and he pitched A24 on the idea of the prequel. They greenlit it, so he kept filming, having already cleared quarantine, and getting a helping hand from the folks at Weta Workshop and the crew of Avatar: The Way of Water, who were in post-production on that film in Wellington as well. They made this film in secret and announced its existence during the release of X. It was a happy accident.

You can understand how the film was born out of an acting exercise, as the film is a character piece, constructed in such a way as to explore Pearl’s motivations, struggles, and possibly explain how a bright-eyed farm girl could become a decrepit hillbilly killer. In Pearl, Mia Goth’s titular protagonist is a fresh-faced young woman living on a farm with her German immigrant parents. The film is set in Texas in 1918, right at the tail end of World War I when the Spanish flu is starting to spread across the world. Pearl’s husband is at war and so she’s left to care for her invalid father (Matthew Sunderland) and carry out the orders of her taskmaster mother (Tandi Wright). She wants to be a dancing star in the pictures and sneaks off to watch them when getting medicine for her father in town. There, she meets a handsome projectionist (David Corenswet), who fills her mind with dreams of stardom and Europe and a bohemian life where you can do what you want and walk away from who the world thinks you should be.

It all sounds nice and dreamy, but Pearl isn’t an ordinary girl dreaming of Hollywood and the escape it promises. She’s not your ordinary girl at all. Right after the opening credits, where we watch her happily feed the animals in the barn, including the beautiful, chestnut-eyed dairy cow named Charlie, she spots a goose strolling into the barn. “What are you doing here Mr. Goose?” she asks in her folksy southern twang, a far cry from her mother’s harsh German accent. She walks forward and we think we’re going to see something out of The Wizard of Oz, a brief fanciful sequence where Pearl talks to “Mr. Goose” and conveys her dreams to the world through him. Nope. She grabs the pitchfork and skewers the goose only to feed him to the crocodile she keeps in the nearby pond.

Pearl isn’t your ordinary farm girl and Pearl isn’t your ordinary horror movie. Where most horror films are draped in shadows and depict their killers as bogeymen in the night, Pearl is sun-drenched and colourful, trying for Technicolor spectacle on a low budget and letting us into the mind of its killer right from the opening scene. While the film is set in 1918 (to allow West and company to comment on the paranoia and isolation of living amid pandemic and war), Pearl takes its stylistic cues from The Wizard of Oz and Golden Age melodramas like those of Douglas Sirk and Nicholas Ray. The colours are bright and the music sweeping—Tyler Bates and Timothy Williams’ score is particularly classical, and all the more memorable for it. There are iris cuts and fadeaway wipes and bouncy credit fonts. There are also dance sequences where the film takes us into Pearl’s mind, such as a disturbingly libidinal slow-dance with a scarecrow in a farmer’s field.

Pearl shows Ti West, ever the pastiche artist, once again trying to capture and refine past cinematic styles and use them to create an engaging atmosphere for a horror picture. He’s ambitious, despite working with modest budgets and the sort of slow-burning narrative storytelling that some horror fans find boring. Credit to him for being so patient and meticulous in executing his preferred artistic vision, especially in a genre that is often slapdash.

As well, it’s not like Pearl is lacking for teeth. The scares aren’t conventional like they are in X. There are no midnight shadows dispatching beautiful horny young people. But there’s still a fatal tension that drives the film’s setpieces, where you dread Pearl giving into her impulses and unleashing her fury on the people she thinks have slighted her. Pearl may be a pastiche of classic Hollywood melodramas the way X is a pastiche of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and other hillbilly slasher flicks from the 1970s, but the film also greatly resembles John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. It shares with that remarkable film the ability to humanize a psychopath to the extent that they become not only sympathetic, but fully, recognizably human. And the closer we get to understanding the killer’s psyche, the petty ways that their inhuman violence is born out of human frailties, the more disturbing the film gets.

West’s patient storytelling and Goth’s meticulous, open-hearted, dangerous performance all lead to Pearl’s showstopper, the kind of sequence that you know every actor dreams about, but few ever get to perform in a movie. For a while, you think it’s the big dance audition, where Pearl thinks she can escape her humdrum life on the farm and set up a future in the movies, but nope. That scene is marvellous, where we are once again swept away into Pearl’s mind as she dances on the stage and imagines herself in a Hollywood dance revue, complete with fellow dancers decked out in army garb and fireworks in the background. But no, the showstopper comes after, when Pearl opens herself up to another person, becomes vulnerable, and shares her truth—to use the modern parlance. And that truth is terrifying.

West holds on a close-up of Goth’s face as Pearl sits at her kitchen table and bears her soul, and every petty anger, every feeling of confusion, every confession of infidelity and violence and soul sickness. He holds and holds and holds, withholding the cut and extending the excruciating tension of knowing that the person Pearl is talking to is thinking the same thing that we are, feeling sad for this broken human who is expressing horrible things, but also terrified about what she’s going to do when she realizes how scary she has become. The shot goes on and on, because how could West look away when Goth is letting us see the soul of this character, letting us into her way of thinking, her way of seeing the world and excusing her actions? It’s showy, it’s performative, it’s absolute gold, especially with Goth pulling us in with her big eyes and wavering lips and childlike expression of disappointment on her doll-like face. It’s the film’s money shot and you can’t look away.

It’s the sort of sequence you would expect seeing a clip of at the Oscars. Not that Mia Goth will be nominated, because Academy types don’t watch movies like Pearl—save for Martin Scorsese, who is apparently a fan of Pearl and Ti West’s other films. But that doesn’t take away from the power of this sequence, which showcases what a great, credible, terrifying performance Mia Goth gives in this film, one that pulls us close only to let her (and West) slip the knife in so easily.

Pearl is notable for its bright colours, its bold emotions, its commitment to atmosphere and style and character, but it’s Goth that makes it remarkable. It could’ve been a low-rent prequel, the sort of thing you’d expect as a special feature on a DVD release, but instead, West and Goth have made an honest-to-God drama. It’s not seamless. It’s not a perfect pastiche. It’s a little slow, even by West’s standards. But damn if it isn’t something artful in a genre that’s so often as commercial as they come.

8 out of 10

Pearl (2022, USA/New Zealand)

Directed by Ti West; written by Ti West and Mia Goth, based on characters created by Ti West; starring Mia Goth, David Corenswet, Tandi Wright, Matthew Sunderland, Emma Jenkins-Purro, Alistair Sewell.

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