One of the few canny touches in Ti West’s X was having Mia Goth play the film’s horny old villainess, Pearl, beneath several layers of prosthetics. That character’s unsettling desires and bizarre fondness for the young Maxine (also played by Goth) felt truly, almost existentially chilling, as when Pearl slowly crawls in bed with an unsuspecting Maxine for a nice cuddle. What made Pearl’s behavior all the more disturbing was the lack of context or a fleshed-out backstory that might explain exactly what’s driving her—something which West’s follow-up prequel-of-sorts attempts to provide, with decidedly mixed results.
In a recent Alamo Drafthouse Q&A, West said that the genesis of Pearl came about from circumstances related to the pandemic. He and Goth churned out a script in two weeks in an attempt to get the film quickly greenlit and potentially shot before they left New Zealand and its Covid-safe shooting conditions behind. This sense of urgency was certainly understandable in a time when filmmakers really had no idea when they’d get a chance to shoot another film, but what primarily shows in the final product is the rushed quality of its conception.
Pearl opens in 1918, a time when WWI and the influenza pandemic were in full bloom. The latter is positioned as a nod to our current pandemic, but aside from a few shots where we see bystanders walking around with masks on, West doesn’t draw any meaningful parallels between how daily life and human interactions were affected by the 1918 pandemic and how they are in the present day. Like so much in Pearl, the pandemic exists solely for reference’s sake.
Elsewhere, the film incessantly nods to its predecessor, both in the appearance of X’s in a number of shots and in a scene with a movie projectionist (David Corenswet) who seduces Pearl by giving her a private screening of an early stag film that he smuggled in from France. The man offers to take her to Paris, potentially giving her the opportunity to pursue her lifelong dream of dancing on the silver screen. After this scene, though, any connection to the porn world that was so prominent in X is dropped, leaving Pearl’s aspirations to become a star in any incarnation of the film world as a pretty flimsy rationalization for the rage that fuels her murder spree in X.
Visually, the film recalls the look of a Golden Age Hollywood melodrama. It even goes out of its way to directly reference The Wizard of Oz when the lonely Pearl, whose husband is serving in the military overseas, makes out with a scarecrow, and later in a handful of shots where she rides her bike past a cornfield, recalling Margaret Hamilton’s Almira Gulch from Victor Fleming’s classic prior to her reappearance as the Wicked Witch of the West. This latter allusion connects Pearl’s innate desire to leave home, and escape her unbearably strict mother (Tandi Wright) and the demands of caring for her completely incapacitated father (Matthew Sunderland), and her potential for unhinged cruelty when her plans are ruined.
It’s perhaps the most purposeful of Pearl’s references, but as with the others, there’s no follow through, so it feels more like the film flaunting its cleverness than attempting to enrich its world or its main character. But despite Pearl’s propensity for empty referentiality, and occasions of tonal whiplash and narrative dead-ends, Goth memorably captures the hopefulness and restfulness that drives Pearl, giving a perfectly modulated performance that organically vacillates between the cheerful and the deeply disturbed. She manages the exceedingly difficult task of being funny, sympathetic, terrifying, and pitiful—sometimes all within the same scene.
In one of the film’s highlights, Pearl performs a dance at an audition to join a troupe that will travel around Texas. After she begins, the background transforms and other dancers magically appear in an elaborate musical number that recalls Oklahoma! There’s a go-for-broke energy to the sequence that speaks to how quickly Pearl loses herself in her imagination, and when it abruptly ends, how easily she can snap when confronted by the harsh realities of her existence.
It’s an amusingly campy sequence that keys us into Pearl’s interior world, but it’s an all-too-brief respite from a film that often feels like it has little to say about Pearl aside from the fact that her ambition is driving her nuts. How she became the sex-crazed maniac in X is a question left hanging in the film, even after its unsettling ending. Which ultimately makes Pearl an empty exercise in style masquerading as a character study, and for as fantastic as Goth is, her performance mostly succeeds at making West’s homages just a little bit easier to stomach.
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