The Story Behind The Shot: Mia Goth’s chilling smile at the end of ‘Pearl’
According to scientific research, smiling and happiness are bidirectional, meaning that happiness makes you smile. Even if you aren’t happy initially, smiling can make you happy if you hold that grin long enough. Tell that to Mia Goth, who, in Ti West’s 2022 horror film Pearl, offers one of the most unforgettable smiles in cinema history. As the painful seconds stretch into excruciating minutes, this closing shot is as audacious and unsettling as any other moment in Goth’s famously bold performance.
Pearl is the second film in West’s X trilogy, which stars Goth in various roles as a woman desperate for stardom. In 2022’s X, she plays two roles – Maxine Minx, a young actor in adult films who travels to a remote farmhouse in the late 1970s to shoot a new film, and Pearl, the elderly woman who owns the farmhouse with her husband and develops an obsession with the young woman.
Shot at the same time as X, Pearl is set in 1918 during World War I and the Spanish Influenza and sees Goth reprise her role as Pearl. This time, the character is a young bride who lives in the farmhouse with her parents and dreams of escaping to become a famous dancer even as her husband fights in the war.
Goth’s performance in the trilogy is utterly fearless. In X, not only was she playing two different roles, but one of them was a woman in her 80s, which required the actor to endure hours in the makeup chair and calibrate her body and voice to that of a much older woman. But it’s in Pearl that her talent is truly unleashed. Goth co-wrote the script with West, and she puts every fibre of her being into the performance, culminating in that unforgettable final shot.
Pearl’s mental state deteriorates throughout the film. From sexually assaulting a scarecrow to feeding a severed head to a crocodile, she explores her psychosis in some truly original ways while also attending to the standard order of business by dismembering bodies and hallucinating her ascent to dancing stardom. She bristles under the oppressive eye of her strict German mother and the pressures of tending to her invalid father. As she spirals into madness, she kills both her parents and keeps the bodies.
Shot to look like a Technicolor melodrama of the 1950s, the film and Pearl’s trajectory could be campy and broad, but it’s Goth’s performance and a monologue she delivers to her sister-in-law Mitzy that brings it down to earth and hints at the tragedy of her slackening grip on reality. “Seems like there’s something missing in me that the rest of the world has,” she says shortly before hacking the woman to death.
At the end of the film, Pearl’s husband, Howard, returns from the war. Walking up the driveway to the front door, the house looks empty. When he enters the kitchen, he stops short. A mouldy, maggot-infested feast is laid on the table, and the corpses of Pearl’s parents are seated around it. When he turns, he sees Pearl standing behind him in dungarees and pigtails, clutching a pitcher of lemonade. “Howard?” she says, “I’m so happy you’re home.” And then she smiles. And smiles. And smiles. As the seconds tick by, the smile transforms. Creepily sunny at first, it wavers. The muscles in her face clench as if forcing the smile to stay put. Her features tremble, her eyes grow watery, and tears begin to fall. Still, the smile stays plastered as she stretches her lips over her teeth like a grimace and then a silent scream.
It’s the standout moment in the film, the moment that holds both Pearl’s terrifying psychosis and the fear that she confided in her sister-in-law. It is garish, sinister, and tragic. Like Norman Bates’s chilling smile at the end of Psycho, it hints at something unknowable, an emotional state that no amount of empathy could make resonant.
In an interview for MaXXXine in 2024 on the podcast Kermode and Mayo’s Take, West told film critic Mark Kermode how that unscripted shot unfolded.
Behind the smile scene in ‘Pearl’
According to the director, he had been planning to make the smile a freeze frame. “I wanted her to smile, and then I would freeze frame, and that would kinda match the opening of the movie freeze frame [in which Pearl joyously hurls a goose she’s just killed to the crocodile],” he explained. But he wasn’t sure exactly what he wanted to capture in her smile, so he told Goth, “I’m going to let it run a little longer because it might be, like, a freeze frame the moment you smile, or I might want to just like wait a beat to see when the right moment is to freeze it.”
He said that he’d only expected to let the camera roll for an extra ten seconds, acknowledging that holding the smile that long would feel awkward. But then something happened. “I was watching her for about ten seconds as she was holding the smile,” he said, “And I then thought, ‘Well, I’ll just hold it another five seconds because I don’t think I need it, but it’s kind of interesting to watch her.’”
Continuing, he added: “And then that turned into another five seconds, and it turned into another five seconds, and then I was just so intrigued by watching her try to hold the smile, I started to see things change in her. I started to see the performance that ended up in the movie, and she started tearing up and crying, and it was so, like, compelling to watch that I just let it go for about two and a half minutes.”
For Goth, it was a painfully therapeutic moment. “I really didn’t think it through at all. Because I’d say that my body always has better ideas than my head,” she said, adding, “That scene proved to be an incredibly cathartic experience for me. A really poignant experience. It’s like a purging.”
