Pearl

Review

Pearl (2022) was amazing. I ended up giving it a 10/10 and I really don’t do that lightly, this is no Repo! This movie is genuinely amazing and something that I would recommend to EVERYONE, it was absolutely fantastic. Ti West and Mia Goth did such an incredible job with this story and movie and I feel like I will be raving about this movie for the next 20 years AT LEAST.

Pearl, at its core, is a movie about a girl in 1918 who dreams of being a star. Pearl throughout her life has had murderous tendencies which her parent have watched with horror. When the movie starts she feels stuck on her family farm with her sick father and her verbally abusive mother whilst her husband is off at war. Throughout the movie, Pearl slowly begins to show the cracks in her psyche to all the people around her and once people realize what’s going on she feels she has no option except to kill the people around her. She tries out for the dance troupe in a last ditch attempt to get off the farm but ends up getting rejected which causes her to completely snap. When her Sister-in-Law brings her home and tries to comfort her she delivers a heartbreaking six minute monologue about what she’s been going through throughout this film before killing Mitzy. The movie ends with her husband coming home from war to find her in her home with her two dead parents overjoyed to see him come home as he stares horrified at the dead bodies at the dinner table.

This movie was so visibly beautiful and between Pearl and Midsommar, I’m really developing a fondness for brightly light, daytime horror where the comfort you feel during the day is forcefully ripped away from you seeing people be brutally killed or tortured during the day. It’s great. There’s definitely something to be said about how there’s almost comfort in the darkness of horror films. Despite the darkness hiding anything lurking within it, it also ends up hiding a lot of the brutality within the kills. These bright films force the audience to fully witness everything that’s occurring, simultaneously tainting the safe space that daylight is and I just love it.

Mia Goth…, how do I put into words how much I absolutely adored her performance. Pearl is a very complex character with a lot of emotions and layers and I think it could have been very easily been a not great performance and it may have easily come across as cringy and bad. HOWEVER, this performance was absolutely amazing and I will happily watch any other movie that Mia Goth stars in. Since she co-wrote the film she definitely had a special sort of insight on the way that Pearl the character works and it definitely showed. This whole movie is a character study on Pearl and without Mia Goth’s performance I don’t know if this movie would work as well for me as it does. Pearl was such an amazing character. She’s so easy to relate to as someone who just wants something bigger and greater and from the moment she was introduced I just loved her. The monologue at the end was quite literally one of the best monologues I’ve ever seen. The way it’s written it’s so relatable, the desperation for love, to get away from hardship, to be normal, all things that I’ve struggled with at some point in my life and if you removed the parts about murder, it’s likely something I’ve tried and failed to explain to people at some point in my life. It was amazing and I’m absolutely obsessed.

Speaking of the character of Pearl, the characters throughout this movie were absolutely top-notch. Every character has layers and most of them are very likable. Even despite me not finding Pearl’s mother likable, she worked so well as a character and she was just so fleshed out and all of her actions and everything she said just made so much sense for her character. The projectionist was surprisingly likable due to the mostly sweet way he treated Pearl and for having some common sense when it came to the red flags that Pearl was displaying. Mitzy was absolutely a highlight and the way that you can tell she really cares for Pearl is so sweet as even after she finds out Pearl is a murderer she still is gentle with her feelings. I just found the characters to be so well done and the movie does a good job of showing all the comlexities that the characters are written to have.

The kills in this movie were done so well. Each one is shocking in it’s own way and yet the film doesn’t kill it’s characters lightly. A touch that I appreciate after the fact is that, even though all other kills are brutal and horrific to watch, the camera pans away when she’s strangling her dad unwilling to be mean-spirited about such a tragic action. This is also likely why we didn’t get to see her feed her dad to Theda and it makes me appreciate this movie more because it shows that Ti West and Mia Goth care about these characters and really want to do right by them. All the other kills were so gruesome and hard to watch and I loved it. I think the image of Mitzy being chopped up and fed to Theda will stick with me for a long while it was hard to watch but it was so cool.

Speaking of Theda, she is probably one of the best uses of Chekov’s Gun I’ve ever seen, ‘if you introduce a gator trained to eat dead things in the first act of a horror movie, somebody has to be fed to the gator by the end’. Like it’s literally iconic and even the moment when she was planning on feeding her dad to the gator you can feel the weight of that set-up and I really thought it was going to happen. This movie does a really good job with set-up and payoff with everything presented in the first act having a satisfying payoff at the end.

I walked out of this movie feeling slightly lost, it was so good and put words to feelings that I’ve had for years. Even her murderous feelings have some level of parallel to queerness which is really cool. Lines like “I know what you do when you think no one is watching” and “ People will see who you really are and are going to be frightened” are horrifically real things said to queer people and so I just really resonated with Pearl on a deeper level than I initially thought I would have.

Point blank, this movie was better than I ever could have thought or imagined and it just really struck a chord with me more than I could have predicted. I’m so happy I watched this movie and it might have changed my life but I probably have to get a little farther from this watch of the movie to say that for sure.

Also one final note, I watched this movie first and then watched X and even though X was released first I think this is the better way to watch both films. A lot of Pearl is set up in the script of X and I think that going into Pearl without that context helps the air of tragic hope that Pearl has for her future and you have for her and the people around her and I think that parallel helps the tone of the movie, if you watched X first both the projectionist and Mitzy’s fates are pretty much spoiled and I think it works better without those spoilers and without knowing for sure Howard’s fate til the end or even if she actually does make it off the farm.