Pearl
Pearl's a dancer
Mia Goth is a picture of psychological disintegration in this tale of a young woman driven mad by loneliness, fear and an overbearing mother. Set in 1918, Pearl tells the story of, well, Pearl, dreaming of Hollywood stardom as she navigates life on the farm under the watchful eye of a cruel, proud mother and a debilitated father who sees all but can no longer communicate.
Pearl is a slow build but hints at the horrors to come from the very first scene when our anti-heroine impales an unsuspecting goose and feeds it to the alligator that lurks beneath the surface of the nearby lake. That alligator seems to represent the repressed and unspoken feelings lurking within all of our primary characters: Mother, with her suspicion that something is decidedly not right with Pearl and an unease about prevailing wartime anti-German sentiment; Father, whose illness or injury has left him ‘locked in’ - seeing and experiencing the world but unable to act in it; and Pearl herself, abandoned to war by her husband and harbouring dreams of literally acting in the movies, her frustrations congealed into homicidal insanity.
The film doesn’t flub the difficult stuff. Pearl’s dance audition is bad. Not as terrible as it might have been in a lesser movie, but quite obviously not good. Her mental fragmentation afterwards is brilliantly performed by Mia Goth. With an increasing amount of red in the frame, Pearl unloads a monologue of repressed resentment to her well-meaning sister-in-law in the film’s best set piece. This is followed by a closing shot in which Pearl’s unhinging is conveyed in a rictus grin that’s held for fully five minutes.
I haven’t seen X, the first in the trilogy of films from writer/director Ti West starring Mia Goth, but I don’t feel that I lost much through lack of context (I do know it takes place on a porn set which is nodded to by the projectionist’s choice of evening entertainment). What I had been expecting was a slasher (perhaps influenced by the poster and a recent viewing of Scream VI) rather than the much more interesting film that I got. Set expectations accordingly and you’ll be rewarded with one of the most inventive and interesting films of the year.
****