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.

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