Of all the smart choices Pearl makes, centering the narrative on Goth is the smartest. West cedes the stage exclusively to Goth instead of asking her to share it with his ensemble as she does in X. Instead of a propulsive thriller, Pearl functions as a character study with psycho underpinnings. Pearl asks us to guess when, and on whom. All her pent-up frustration and ego has to vent at some point. As Pearl waits for her husband Howard’s return home from Europe, her patience with her parents, Mitzy, and even the projectionist grows deliriously thin. Plot plays little part in Pearl: The film revolves around Pearl’s confrontations with Ruth, chitchats with her sister-in-law Mitzi (Emma Jenkins-Purro), uncomfortable bathtimes with her dad, and occasional unauthorized jaunts to the town theater, run by a fine as wine fella referred to only as “the projectionist” (David Corenswet). The callous joke West tells about Pearl in these films is that she isn’t a star at all, just a delusional naif with dreams outsized to her talent. She just needs a big shot working in the pictures to discover her. Farm life, she declares repeatedly, isn’t for her. Pearl goes about her daily chores with a blithe spirit. She lives on the farm where the events of X take place with her flinty German mother Ruth (Tandi Wright) and invalid father (Matthew Sunderland). It’s 1918 and Pearl is in her 20s (or possibly her late teens). Placed side-by-side, though, there’s no contest. Combined, both films make an argument for Goth as one of 2022’s most vital actors, or if not that then certainly the gutsiest. Where the latter clumsily connects porn’s golden age to the 1970s independent film movement, the former states its own thesis clearly: movies are a wonderful escape from dreary reality, but they aren’t an excuse to disassociate from it. Pearl gets everything right where X gets so much wrong. Perhaps Goth’s touch is the secret sauce X sorely needed. In Pearl, Goth returns as the killer in her youth, but her second role as co-screenwriter proves even more important. In X, Goth played both the final girl (aspiring porn star Maxine Minx) and the resentfully decrepit killer Pearl. Filmed back-to-back with X before that movie earned $14 million on a budget of $1M, Pearl proves that A24’s first horror franchise is Mia Goth, who pulls double duty once again in a movie that manages to out-perform the original in nearly every way. So it may come as a surprise that Pearl, the surprise prequel to Ti West’s surprise horror hit X, not only matches but exceeds the original. Even before George Lucas poisoned the well, it was generally agreed that trying to tell a new story set before the original was more trouble than its worth. If a new movie manages to scare up a profit at the box office, you can pretty much assume a sequel is already in the works. Horror sequels are nothing out of the ordinary.
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