‘Pearl’ Review: Mia Goth shines in Ti West’s audacious sequel
A24 has most certainly elevated the quality of modern horror in the past decade or so, giving voice to underrepresented filmmakers whilst providing creative confidence in some of the genre’s biggest voices. One such figure is the long-time genre experimenter Ti West, who last year released the beloved slasher thriller X, a homage to the greatest horror flicks of the late 1970s, such as Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
Released as a throwaway love letter to 20th-century horror, few realised quite how monumental West’s film would be, sparking a trilogy of movies that, so far, have followed a creepy thematic throughline of ageing, regret and loss. The sequel, which has long been released in America, Pearl, takes audiences back to the 1910s when the titular villain of the original movie was merely a young teenager causing carnage on her family’s Texas homestead.
Played by Mia Goth, who has quickly become West’s potent collaborator and an iconic ‘Scream Queen’ in her own right, Pearl is an unhinged adolescent with aspirations to become a movie star but none of the natural talent to back up her lofty ambitions. Hoping to be a dancer, she sets her sights on a local competition, but as the truth of reality begins to blend with her own psychosis, Pearl becomes murderously angry.
Saturating the colour scheme and toying with a soundtrack that respires with dramatic strings, West sets his horror within a homage to Hollywood’s golden age. Taking inspiration from Victor Fleming’s Wizard of Oz and Robert Stevenson’s Mary Poppins, the world of Pearl feels childlike and wondrous, making the title character’s own bloody journey into self-destruction all the more disturbing when it eventually rolls around.
‘Eventually’ is an apt term, too, as just like 2022s X, and indeed much of West’s filmography, Pearl holds back for much of its runtime, taking the space to develop its lead character in an unfamiliar world before it unleashes its magnetising villain in all her glory. Though it could be described as ‘slow’ by some, its steady pace matches the muted tones of the exact movies it’s paying homage to.
By the time you’ve seen Pearl’s insanity grow layer by layer, the moment she eventually bursts at the seams is utterly joyous, with Goth’s magnetising central performance helping to extract an uneasy sense of total fragility, where the chaos of any given situation teeters in the balance. With little to help her in a supporting sense, other than Tandi Wright, who plays Pearl’s domineering mother with convincing menace, Goth is left to control the weight of the film on her own and thus rises to the occasion, commanding the attention of the audience with every piercing glare and trembling lip.
An audacious sequel that builds on the themes of the first film without at all rehashing its material, Pearl is a modern marvel of horror that demonstrates the creative eccentricity of one of cinema’s most thriving genres. As much a horror as it is a spiky coming-of-age tragedy, West’s film effortlessly fuses genres with one foot in the past and its eyes firmly on the future. As sequels go, it’s quite something.
