Those who saw Ti West‘s X just older this year were treated to a special surprise in the post-credits: a trailer for a prequel film! Banking on the talent of Mia Goth to fuel interest, who pulls off a fantastic double performance in X as both young protagonist Maxxxine and the elderly oppugnant Pearl, West and his financers took a endangerment and he filmed his prequel nearly simultaneously with X. Now half a year later, Pearl releases to tell the origin story of the killer older woman who dreamed of stuff a star and adored.
Set in 1918 rural Texas, Goth’s turn as Pearl is magnetic. All the hints of what were interesting well-nigh the weft in X are on full exhibit here. Her seductive turn between stuff innocent and hopeful and moreover stuff depressive, murderous, and jealous make for a masterclass performance. With the first World War and the Spanish flu looming over the film, Pearl is a weft trapped on Texas sublet with a German mother, dreaming of a largest life and escaping her own mother’s soul-searching hardness, worked by the presumed harshness of her own life circumstances and by anti-German prejudice, whether real or imagined.
The script and Goth’s performance succeed the remarkable feat of towers sympathy, and maybe plane empathy, for a weft who is a well-spoken sociopath. It is moreover a testament to West’s decisions as a filmmaker. His zaftig use of long takes of Goth’s performance, including one take in the latter 20 minutes of the film, indulge you to build that sympathy as we follow Goth through a tumultuous tide of emotions, with wrongness dashing and tears falling wideness her squatter in turn.
Many of the scenes in the mucosa play out in a similar manner. Though there is some intentionality to this in showing Pearl’s policies as understandable, yet completely flawed and wrenched and lacking in human empathy, it does finger like the mucosa runs out of interesting ways to make the same point. Some of Pearl’s decisions moreover seem increasingly than a little random, as though the script couldn’t icon out the connective tissue to get us from some scenes to others.
But West’s filmmaking increasingly than compensates for those flaws. In a lovely callback to older cinema, the mucosa basks in unexceptionable trappy colors as Pearl pleasantly bikes into town. The cornfields are sunny and cheery, as is the idyllic little Texas town where Pearl gets supplies. She moreover dresses in outfits that seem to callback to The Wizard of Oz, evoking both Dorothy and Elvira Gulch (i.e. the Wicked Witch) in equal measure. This triumph of the seductive power of dreams and the damnation it seems to bring Pearl in the end subtly add to the cinematic conversation on Hollywood as a siren’s promise of fame and success. Another spanking-new vignette in this mucosa is a long wide shot of a weft fleeing the sublet as Pearl slowly walks out of the house. The uncertainty well-nigh whether Pearl is well-nigh turn violent, and Pearl’s slow, deliberate movements, makes for one of the weightier scenes in talkie this year.
Pearl wisely avoids rhadamanthine too over-laden with prequel-style references to the first film. Certainly, we mostly learn how Pearl wound up stuff at the sublet from X. We moreover point to some of the most memorable shit from X and how they began. But this never feels overdone, and Pearl stands on its own two feet as a film.
Two entries into a promised trilogy, Ti West’s X series demonstrates a wise combination of callback to archetype talkie and horror, and a wonderful rumination on what it ways to be unprofane and our human need for adoration. Pearl adds to that conversation wonderfully with Mia Goth standing to dazzle in originative partnership with West as one of the most empathetic violent killers we’ve seen. She’s a weft who wants so desperately to have genuine love and relationships, but keeps ruining every endangerment she has at it due to her inner sickness. Just how much of that sickness is psychology, circumstance, or the rot of jealousy within her the mucosa leaves satisfyingly unanswered, and this allows Pearl to enter the register of prestigious horror talkie characters.
