Pearl review with Mia Goth

PEARL
Written and directed by Ti West
103 minutes, rated MA
Generally
★★★★

Ti West’s is set in rural Texas near the end of World War I pearl is billed as a prequel to his recent slasher film X, about a porn shoot gone wrong in the 1970s. But this delicately perverse Cinderella tale works just as well on its own, floating in some ways out of time like a parable of cinema in general.

While her husband (Alistair Sewell) struggles, downtrodden Pearl (Mia Goth) sits on her family farm with her Gaga father (Matthew Sunderland) and her strict Germanic mother (Tandi Wright), who still treats her like a child firmly. As a regular at the Cityscape Palace, she longs to break free and become a star.

As if stepping into those unlikely fantasies, the film’s look digitally approximates the Technicolor opulence of Hollywood a few decades later. The sky is cloudless blue, cornfields are golden, and the red dress Pearl wears to a make-or-break audition shimmers like the ruby ​​slippers in it The Wizard of Oz.

Like every western movie pearl has a reserved, even minimalist side: it suggests the illustration of a thesis, and takes time to get where it wants to go. Ultimately, though, it’s excessive in more ways than one, the saccharine palette upping the shock value of the culminating gruesome set pieces that pointedly coincide with the most elaborate tracking shots.

The effect is not heartless or even completely ironic. Part of that is because the film is designed so openly as a showcase for goth, channeling some of the young Shelley Duvall’s awkward uniqueness: her spiral into hysteria has an element of camp, but not in a way that allows us to to make us feel good distance.

Like the film as a whole, the character is sculpted to elicit contrasting responses. Pearl is simultaneously knowing and naive, grotesque and innocent, and while all too aware that something is wrong with her, she is determined to control her own image rather than be reduced to a monster or a funny character.

Similarly contradictory, going to the cinema is portrayed as an activity with a public and a private side, and films themselves are understood as both fantasies and glimpses of a hidden reality, as in the porn film Pearl, directed by a teenage projectionist (David Corenswet), who sees himself as a local sheikh.