When it comes down to it, everybody wants to be loved and wanted. The opening of Pearl, writer/director Ti West’s prequel to X, reveals itself with big, bold font and a slow shot exiting the doors of a sunny Texas farm. Tyler Bates and Chelsea Wolfe’s score lulls you in with its triumphant, 1920s-style flair of instrumentation. We see Pearl (Mia Goth) admiring herself in the mirror, draped in old clothes from her mother, Ruth (Tandi Wright). Pearl has big dreams of being and leaving the small-town life behind and seeing the world. She sneaks out to the local theater and watches a chorus line girl film, hoping to become one of them. But reality can be complicated — for every fantasy that goes through Pearl’s mind, a harsh reminder of what her life smacks her in the face.
X‘s concern is to show the aftermath of what Pearl has been through in a 1970s Grindhouse style. While that film boasts an ensemble cast of Goth, Brittney Snow, Jenna Ortega, and Kid Cudi, Pearl is a playground for Goth to explore the character. The narrative splits its time, striving to sympathize with Pearl’s situation while showing us that something is wrong inside her. Now, the farm is not exactly a hot rod for excitement. Pearl mostly spends her days doing chores and tending to her paralyzed father (played by Matthew Sunderland) under the strict guidance of her mother. The Spanish flu epidemic is at its peak, making any venture outside the farm risky, and Pearl’s husband, Howard (Alistair Sewell), is off fighting in World War I.
The film makes all these restrictive elements collide, where Pearl’s unraveling may come slowly, but falls like a hammer when it does. West hints at how this will play out early in the film — when a duck meets its demise by Pearl’s pitchfork and is fed to her crocodile companion. Goth conveys an unnerving sense of uneasiness which might be compared to characters like Annie Wilkes in Misery and Norman Bates in the Psycho films. Beneath her smile lies hiding a dizzying amount of hysteria. While Pearl’s immediate circumstances may want you to root for her, she cautions us with the confession that she’s “not really a good person.”
Much of Pearl predicates itself on the action chops of Goth, who takes the character to another level in how she changes emotions. Some settings repeat themselves often. Much of the arguments between Pearl and Ruth happen at the dinner table. Because this film was shot during the peak of the COVID pandemic, there are a lot of limited uses in the setting overall. Also, the horror/slasher aspects don’t kick into full throttle until the third act. Pearl is more of an investigation of what it means for a person when their dreams die slowly.
Pearl interacts with two other characters, Howard’s sister Mitsy (Emma Jenkins-Purro) and a projectionist (played by David Corenswet). These two people represent the parts of Pearl that have been repressed because of her suffocating home situation. Mitsy tells Pearl that a local church is doing auditions to take one woman to join their dancing tour. Finally, a stroke of luck bounces Pearl’s way! I mean, fate can’t always be cruel, right? The projectionist plays to Pearl’s inner urges (which manifest themselves in X). He tells her she’ll be a star one day if she keeps at it and also floats an idea for her to be in “illegal tawdry” films popular in Europe then.
As a self-described traveler, it doesn’t matter what his backstory is. His mere presence awakens the sexual urges inside of Pearl and the need to be wanted by someone. The sunlight-filed cinematography of Eliot Rockett plays into the film’s dark humor aspects — the scarcity of people, impending forces playing on Pearl’s naïveté and hopeful nature, and that nighttime scenes are few is a character in itself. Pearl takes advantage of the period, often inter-cutting dance numbers reminiscent of the wartime 1920s. While our antagonist finds herself as the butt of some misplaced jokes, the payoff comes with the wait.
Is Pearl herself an unreliable narrator? Well, desire, repression, and stagnancy all make for combustible elements in an unstable person. Not everyone can ride a wave to stardom, but we have to define what we feel is a life fulfilled. The audience is taken through an illustrated journey of all that can go wrong and be manipulated.
