With the hothouse Gothic Pearl, a mostly pleasing oddity co-written by director Ti West and star Mia Goth following their previous 2022 collaboration X (and serving as a prequel to that picture), the pair have delivered a movie that plays like a supersaturated, Technicolor storybook and period throwback, a tongue-in-cheek yet luridly brazen shocker.
Conceived as a marriage between Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and Lizzie Borden, West and Goth have constructed the cheerfully lurid tale of a sweet young cinephile prepared to stop at nothing to follow her dreams of stardom out of the Texas cornfields and into the movies.
While not required viewing, X, the pair’s knowing throwback to 70s horror (and porn)—which nodded to Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with its ace aesthetic (even if it did run out of steam in its second half)—may help in understanding Pearl, or at least her motivations, set decades earlier and charting the rising madness of that picture’s septuagenarian killer. In X, aged Pearl was played under heavy make-up by Goth, who did double duty as X’s fledgling porn performer, inadvertently caught up in a series of brutal murders. Goth’s performance(s) in that picture were district and believable, her Pearl rendering the young star unrecognizable.
With the hothouse Gothic Pearl, a mostly pleasing oddity co-written by director Ti West and star Mia Goth following their previous 2022 collaboration X (and serving as a prequel to that picture), the pair have delivered a movie that plays like a supersaturated, Technicolor storybook and period throwback, a tongue-in-cheek yet luridly brazen shocker.
Conceived as a marriage between Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and Lizzie Borden, West and Goth have constructed the cheerfully lurid tale of a sweet young cinephile prepared to stop at nothing to follow her dreams of stardom out of the Texas cornfields and into the movies.
While not required viewing, X, the pair’s smart throwback to 70s horror and porn which nodded to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with an ace aesthetic (even if it did run out of steam in its second half), may help in understanding Pearl, or at least her motivations. Set decades earlier and charting the early life of that picture’s septuagenarian killer, played in that picture by Goth under aging make-up. Goth also played X’s ingenue lead, Maxine, a fledgling adult film star inadvertently caught up in a series of brutal murders.
This time, West and Goth revisit their murderous creation, an oversexed and love-starved senior driven to distraction and murder, as a rural farm girl circa 1918 Texas, and they’ve shifted the tone from slasher tropes to hot and bothered melodrama, with so much color and heat as to suggest the return of Douglas Sirk. It’s lovingly made and mainly worth seeing for Goth’s commitment-to-the-bit performance, which is kookily, endearingly off-center and then, in a tonal shift that mostly works, off-the-edge homicidal. While not a drama, Pearl successfully endeavors to create an articulated pathology that mostly makes sense, delivered in an eight-minute closing monologue (one wonders if Goth wrote this meaty passage for herself, as it is an acting showcase).
If you’ve seen X, you’ll immediately recognize the location, which in that picture was a creepily decrepit old country house, restored here to its former Golden Age glory in the widescreen opening shot. That house is home to early twenty-something Pearl and her German immigrant parents, which include a hardline disciplinarian of a mother (Tandi Wright), who insists Pearl work only for the family’s sustenance, and invalid father (Matthew Sunderland), in front of whom Pearl stands naked in the bathtub, and who she dreams of feeding to the friendly neighborhood alligator.
With her young husband away at war for two years, Pearl’s days are spent caretaking and housecleaning, but her mind is always on the movies, to which she sneaks away for silent pictures, dreaming of being a chorus girl and delivered from farmer’s daughter status. The family, essentially poverty stricken, have no time for frivolousness, Pearl’s mother dismissing her daughter’s illusions of stardom: “You will fail.”
Pearl herself whiles away afternoons in the barn where she’s named the animals after her favorite film stars, performing hayloft production numbers with a pitchfork to assuage her abject boredom and dissatisfaction. She’s also sexually frustrated, and in one comically startling moment, entertains a cornfield tryst with the family’s scarecrow. Yes, you read that right.
Pearl befriends a handsome projectionist (David Corenswet) at the local theater, and before long he’s showing her stag films and, after closing time, more. His mistake is getting too close. While Pearl looks innocent enough—a sort of wide-eyed Shelley Duvall type who speaks in a staccato, sweetly energetic cadence—she’s shown us that she’s down for pitchforking a goose, a gleeful barbarism she’s ready to graduate to mom and dad.
Pearl’s fortunes begin to look up on the news from her sister-in-law (a very good Emma Jenkins-Purro) that a traveling dance troupe is looking for a girl to join their chorus line and tour the state, a big break that has Pearl declare that, “It has to be me.” Her audition sequence is pure visual invention, and Goth’s reaction upon hearing the casting news is hilariously, blackly funny. Such is the way of Pearl, an often bloody and violent movie with tonal switches—comic to horrific to cornpone melodrama—that keeps us off balance as to how to react.
Unlike X, Pearl can’t be called a thriller, and it can’t be written off as a mere trifle because Goth works overtime to create an original, often empathetic person. We like Pearl and we understand her, and as such go willingly with her to the dark side. A smart and motivated actress, Goth makes the most of the material, which without her would likely seem wan or merely an arch experiment in style. By the time the film reaches her climactic final confessional, Goth makes you believe in Pearl’s quest for a life of liberation, fame and, as she vividly describes, adoration. Just how and why Pearl needs such validation is quite simply one of the movie year’s best performed moments on the back of a smart and motivated actress in an original performance.
Pearl is a mostly entertaining lark, if a tad overdetermined, and must be seen for Goth’s energy and its luscious lensing, courtesy of cinematographer Eliot Rockett.
3 stars
