PEARL
*****
Directed by Ti West.
Starring Mia Goth, David Corenswet, Tandi Wright, Matthew Sunderland.
USA, 102 mins, Certificate 15.
Released on Limited Edition and Standard Edition 4K UHD by Second Sight on 17th November
Ti West, who co-wrote, directed, produced and edited PEARL, has never made the same film twice – even when he somehow got a trilogy of films about the same characters into cinemas between 2022 and 2024. Its predecessor, the 1979 set slasher X, was released just six months earlier in the U.S., and spiced up the sub-genre formula with old-school wipe transitions, split screens, and a poignant resurrection of so-called “Hag Horror” tropes to a bona fide musical interlude.
Mia Goth, who wrote PEARL with West, gave a remarkable dual performance in X as rising adult movie star/final girl Maxine and psychotic geriatric Pearl - fulfilling years of promise in an eclectic range of challenging roles and movies, including THE SURVIVALIST (2015). A CURE FOR WELLNESS (2017) and SUSPIRIA (2018). Graced with a gorgeous orchestral score by returning composer Tyler Bates and Tim Williams, the middle part of the trilogy shifts from the seedy 1970s porn milieu of X to a plot and visual style (via Eliot Rockett’s beautiful widescreen cinematography) channelling the melodramas of Douglas Sirk.
The first two movies were developed and shot during the Covid pandemic, and PEARL’s plot unfolds in 1918, at the end of the First World War with Spanish Flu raging around the globe, reflected with images that became routine in 2020, including characters wearing face masks. Pearl is an ambitious young Texan woman, leading an oppressive existence with her German immigrant parents while her husband is in the trenches. Her mother is a strict religious fanatic, her father ravaged by a debilitating stroke. There are early signs of the psychosis we saw in old-age Pearl in X, and a direct reference to her weapon of choice when her younger self kills a duck with a pitchfork.
Goth has the showcase of her career, bringing three-dimensional life to this character at a pivotal time in her life. Pearl loves dancing and movies, seeing PALACE FOLLIES at the cinema and dreaming of a future where the whole world knows her name. A wonderful fantasy sequence combines innocent optimism with raunch and THE WIZARD OF OZ as she envisions a Hollywood-style dance number with a scarecrow in a top hat who brings her to orgasm in a cornfield. She asks God to make her a star while her friend (Emma Jenkins-Purro) brings hope of escape and handsome Bohemian projectionist David Corenswet (subsequently a charming Clark Kent) flirts and shows her early stag films.
PEARL is a horror film where we’re so invested in a character whose fate we already know, where the wrenching tragedy of what might have been looms large. Tensions at home and a looming dance audition pay off with a dark and stormy night and a fiery accident. Goth’s astonishingly empathetic/unnerving performance would be a favourite for an Oscar if the Academy gave more than token recognition to horror movies. An extended dialogue scene in which Pearl pours out her heart about a lost baby and her wide-ranging insecurity/sense of failure, of never achieving her dreams, is as moving and powerful a piece of screen acting as any in “respectable” movies this decade.
Low-key as a horror crack-up picture and heart-wrenching for what we know is coming, Ti West’s best picture to date is capped by a simultaneously warped/moving family dinner and an unforgettable long take of the grinning and grimacing Pearl that continues through the credits and leaves us bereft. It’s our genre’s LONG GOOD FRIDAY moment.
Second Sight’s characteristically lush Limited Edition release comes with new artwork by Thinh Dinh, six collector’s cards and a 120 page book of essays from writers including Jenn Adams, Vannah Taylor and Nadine Whitney. Both disc releases contain a rich, stunning 4K transfer of the film itself. An antidote to that period of American horror in which every other genre film had a putrid, green/grey visual aesthetic that made you want to polish your own eyeballs afterwards. The vivid Technicolor style palette here perfectly reflects Pearl’s tragic yearning for a Hollywood life.
You get to see the chameleonic Goth (and hear her real accent!) in a couple of short featurettes carried over from earlier disc releases, but there’s an array of excellent extras new to this edition. While Joe Wallace contributes a thoughtful video essay, “Hollywood Goes West” (10 mins), the always-listenable Alexandra Heller-Nicholas provides what she describes as a “cathartic” audio commentary celebrating Goth as “the patron saint of horror girlies”, tapping into film history, stardom, the cinemagoing experience and other pertinent themes of what she considers “the real masterpiece of the trilogy”.
The Phillip Escott-produced on-camera interviews are up to the usual Second Sight standard. Ti West, in “Bold Choices” (19 mins) recalls his pre-X break from horror, the filming restrictions of the pandemic and Goth’s commitment to the role. In “The Mother” (28 mins), actor Tandi Wright celebrates her monologue of descending insanity as a stage play within the film, while “Absorb the Aesthetic" (13 mins) has Eliot Rockett explaining how an early plan for PEARL as a German Expressionism-influenced black and white prequel evolved into the film we got. On a similar note, “Going Technicolor” (19 mins) features production designer Tom Hammock, who enthuses about the transition from the tobacco hues of X to PEARL’s spectacular look.
An outstanding release in what is clearly a fabulous time to be a horror fan.
Steven West