Director – Ti West, Screenplay – Mia Goth & Ti West, Producers – Jacob Jaffke, Harrison Kneiss, Kevin Turen & Ti West, Photography – Eliot Rockett, Music – Tyler Bates & Tim Williams, Visual Effects – OhuFX, Visual Effects Supervisor – Frank Reuter, Prosthetics – Weta Workshop (Supervisor – Brad Cunningham), Production Design – Tom Hammock. Production Company – Little Lamb/Mad Solar.
Cast
Mia Goth (Pearl), David Corenswet (Projectionist), Tandi Wright (Ruth), Matthew Sunderland (Father), Emma Jenkins-Purro (Mitsy), Alistair Sewell (Howard)
Plot
Rural Texas, 1918. Pearl grows up on a farm with her mother and a wheelchair-ridden father. Pearl’s husband Howard is off fighting in the war in Europe. Pearl wants with all her heart to be a star and becomes determined to enter a dance competition she hears about. At the same time, she befriends and sleeps with a friendly projectionist at the local movie theatre. However, when Pearl’s dreams fail to come about, something dark inside her starts to emerge.
X (2022) was one of the great surprises of 2022, an excavation of the 1970s porn film by way of the Backwoods Brutality genre. Shot in New Zealand during the Covid-19 lockdown, it emerged out of nowhere to get some great buzz for Ti West and its star Mia Goth in dual roles. During publicity for the film, West then announced that he had shot another entire film, Pearl, a prequel, after finishing X. Pearl was conceived and co-written by West and Mia Goth while both were in two week customs quarantine to enter New Zealand for shooting. This was released six months after X. And as Pearl is released, West was already at work on a third film in the trilogy, the subsequently released MaXXXine (2024).
I was quite amazed with what Ti West did with X. On the other hand, I felt less of the same thing when it came to Pearl. What ended up constantly distracting me about the film was its anachronisms – things like film with a synchronised soundtrack in 1918; theatres with modern-styled projectors. What seemed most glaring is having the rural Texan populace of 1918 masking up. This seems more a reflection of the story being written in the midst of the 2020-1 Corona Virus pandemic than any historic depiction of the Spanish Flu. Certainly, there were recommendations for masking made by various US state and health bodies back in the day but these were widely rejected in many parts of the country or only voluntarily implemented.
The other aspect that never fully convinced me was Mia Goth’s performance. I thought Goth’s dual performances as the porn starlet Maxine and the aging Pearl in X was extraordinary – something that should have given her the recognition that she is well overdue by now. On the other hand, it feels like she has overextended herself by playing the young Pearl as well. The problem being that the film is rooted in a specific time and place. Goth comes from Brazilian-Canadian parentage while her bio tells me that she grew up in Brazil and London. She doesn’t seem a natural fit as the backwoods Texas country girl, doesn’t seem to quite wear the accent or the guileless innocence. If you want to see someone who does then look at Sissy Spacek – an actress who was actually born in rural Texas – in films like Prime Cut (1972), Badlands (1973) or Raggedy Man (1981).
Mia Goth wields an axe as Pearl
The other reason that Pearl didn’t work for me is that we get an hour of nothing happening. We go from X, which was a Backwoods Brutality film in effect, to watching an hour’s worth of Mia Goth’s farm girl tending cows and her ill father, having dreams of being a dancer and dallying with the handsome projectionist. All of which seems to completely the opposite of what you expect when you come to watching a horror film.
Certainly, the film does go memorably off the rails in the latter half-hour or so about the point that Mia Goth goes batshit crazy and attacks mother Tandi Wright, kills David Corenswet with a pitchfork and the final scene pursuing her friend with an axe. Goth has a fantastic scene where she sits at a table with Emma Jenkins-Purro who encourages her to say all the things she would to her absent husband and Goth lets loose on a soliloquy that goes on for several minutes and keeps getting darker and more disturbed. It’s a great piece in which Goth gives it her all, more than making up for the lack of conviction in her earlier scenes.
If anything, the Maxine/Pearl trilogy of films seem to be Ti West saying something about the ways in which celebrity and having the X Factor can be corrupting. X showed a version of Mia Goth that had it and depicted the wannabes and shysters that collected around her, while Pearl casts Goth as someone who dreams of having that X Factor but doesn’t make the connections, and MaXXXine shows her on the cusp of making it still haunted by disturbed psychos. I am not fully sure what the point West is making about this, except perhaps to point out that dark and disturbed things lurk in smalltown Texas that seem to virulently hate Hollywood and celebrity.
Ti West began making films for Larry Fessenden’s Glass Eye Pix with the likes of The Roost (2005) and Trigger Man (2007), as well as Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever (2009) for others producers. His next two Glass Eye pics The House of the Devil (2009) and the ghost story The Innkeepers (2011) started to gain attention. He followed this with The Sacrament (2013), a modern Found Footage retelling of the Jonestown mass suicide. West spent the 2010s turning out episodes of anthologies like The ABCs of Death (2012) and V/H/S (2012), with only one other feature film the Western In a Valley of Violence (2016), plus assorted tv episode work.
