Venice 2022: Pearl

VENICE / A24

Stuck inside his hotel room for two weeks of quarantine prior to the filming of X, writer-director Ti West decided to entertain himself by writing a prequel script about the slasher homage’s lead villain, the octogenarian Pearl. He ended up having so much fun during this process, that he showed the first draft to Mia Goth (already set to play the elderly killer with heavy prosthetics and make-up). She loved it, the two of them wrote more parts together, and they managed to convince A24 to produce this 1918-set prequel back-to-back with X.

The fact that this was a pandemic production is clear right from its opening moments: World War I has just ended, soldiers are coming back from the battlefield, and the tragedy of the Spanish Flu is still felt in the air. By setting Pearl in a past that is too present, given where we are with the state of the world, makes for an oddly cathartic viewing experience inside a theater: a reminder that many parts of history are cyclical, and that hopefully we are coming out of the pandemic just like people in 1918.

Among these people there is young Pearl, waiting for her husband to return from Europe, with the ambition of becoming a dancer in silent pictures. Her daydreaming (reminiscent of Disney cartoons as she dances in front of farm animals) is stifled by her German mother, who cuts her wings and keeps her grounded to heart, constantly reminding her that she will never be a star and that she needs to tend to her paraplegic father (victim of the flu) until her husband is back.

It may sound like Pearl is a classic tale of an underdog, a pre-talkies La La Land where audiences root for the heroine to show to the world that she is, indeed, a star. But this is not the film that Ti West and Mia Goth made. If X was a subversive throwback to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and other exploitation films from the ‘70s, Pearl is a pastiche of musicals and horror films from the first half of the 20th century. It is The Wizard of Oz meets Strait-Jacket with Joan Crawford, a colorful, cheery, melodramatic facade that harbors something much darker underneath.

For as vibrant as Pearl is, the old Hollywood aesthetic is inherent to the title character’s psychology and hopes. She is so obsessed with cinema, wanting to appear on the silver screen, dancing to her favorite tunes, that she sees the world around her as fully cinematic. This obsession also lies in the moral and sexual repression that her mother forces on her, which leads young Pearl to commit some deranged acts that are as funny as they are upsetting. It is only at the end of the film that the pleasant and comforting beauty dies off, as Mia Goth delivers a stream-of-consciousness monologue that is one of the most harresting, show-stopping moments in cinema this year, worthy of every plaudit for the actress-screenwriter.

It is such an honest and raw scene that gives depth to Pearl (both the film and character), all about the way women are forced on certain paths, be it by their families or their partners, and how they try to make the most of situations where they accept their constricting fates. Mia Goth’s forced smile during the closing credits, which slowly turns into a crying grimace, says it all: it is impossible to keep pretending that everything is alright, when deep inside there is pain and regret for a life that can never be achieved.

Nearly perfect in its presentation and with a powerhouse performance by Goth, the movie really only loses points because of its rushed nature. With a slightly bigger budget and more time to prep, this could have used a couple more scenes to truly shine and reach the high peaks of X, both with its horror and thematic brilliance. Pearl is still a massive surprise, though viewers have to realign their expectations to get the most out of it. Come for an axe-wielding Mia Goth in a bright red dress, stay for a truly touching and funny character study on the dangers of suppressing one’s true identity. A solid standalone, but together with X, it makes for one of the best and most rewarding double-bills in recent memory.