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Pearl review: a star is born (and is very, very bloody)

Pearl is a candy-coated piece of rotten fruit. The film, which is director Ti West’s prequel to this year’s X , trades in the desaturated look and 1970s seediness of its parent film for a lurid, Douglas Sirk-inspired aesthetic that seems, at first, to exist incongruently with its story of intense violence and horror. But much like its titular protagonist, whose youthful beauty and Southern lilt masks the monster within, there’s a poison lurking beneath Pearl ’s vibrant colors and seemingly untarnished Depression-era America setting.

Set around 60 years before X , West’s new prequel does away with the por nstars, abandoned farms, and eerie old folks that made its predecessor’s horror influences clear and replaces them with poor farmers, charming film projectionists, and young women with big dreams. Despite those differences, Pearl still feels like a natural follow-up to X . The latter film, with its use of split screens and well-placed needle drops, offered a surprisingly dark rumination on the horror of old age. Pearl , meanwhile, explores the loss of innocence and, in specific, the often terrifying truths that remain after one’s dreams have been unceremoniously ripped away from them.

At the center of both films is the lonely, impulsive serial killer that Mia Goth has now played at both the start and end of her life. In X , Goth’s dueling performances as Pearl and Maxine shione amid an array of memorable supporting turns from the film’s other stars. Pearl , conversely, puts Goth at the front and center of its story. In doing so, the film offers its star the chance to give one of the best and most vulnerable performances of the year so far.

Pearl begins in 1918, a year when many American men are still fighting the war overseas while those who are stateside have been left to grapple with the horror of the Spanish Flu. It’s a time that is capable of making anyone go a little mad, which is why it’s the worst — or perfect, depending on how you view it — environment for a young Pearl (Goth) to grow up in. When the film begins, Pearl is still living under the same suffocating roof as her domineering mother, Ruth (Tandi Wright), who makes her routinely bathe and feed her crippled father (Matthew Sunderland), all while Pearl is left to pray nightly for her husband, Howard (Alistair Sewell), to return home safely from the war.

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Her poor relationship with her mother, combined with her own crushing loneliness, has made Pearl want nothing more than to get far, far away from her family’s farm. While she’s been able to stave off the suffocating mood of her life by routinely escaping into her own fantasies, a sudden act of cheerful, nonchalant violence in the film’s opening minutes makes it clear that Goth’s future serial killer is already on the brink of total collapse by the time Pearl catches up with her. As a result, the film’s script, which West and Goth co-wrote together, doesn’t take on the same slasher movie structure as X .

Instead, Pearl frequently feels like a kind of twisted coming-of-age story. In fact, like all the great heroes in all the great coming-of-age stories, the journey Pearl goes on throughout the film is one of self-acceptance. Over the course of Pearl ‘s 102-minute runtime, she’s forced to let her defenses down and learn how to be vulnerable in front of others. The only problem is that the real Pearl, the one she hides beneath a smile that feels alternately mischievous and menacing, has a habit of scaring those around her — and for good reason.

Pearl’s descent into full-blown madness is juxtaposed quite effectively against the film’s bright Technicolor look. The resulting effect is one that makes Pearl seem, at times, like a horror film directed by French filmmaker Jacques Demy. The film’s sets are covered in bright pastel colors (an alleyway drainpipe is noticeably painted pink in one memorable scene) in a way that even calls to mind a film like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg , which still looks as if it had been designed to look as sweet and delectable as possible. That said, the film that Pearl has the most in common with is not The Young Girls of Rochefort or X , but Blue Velvet .

Like that 1986 David Lynch-directed classic, Pearl is interested in exploring the rot that lies beneath the surface of so many American archetypes. Pearl’s desperate desire to escape her hometown notably,places her in the same emotional space as practically every cinematic high schooler or Disney princess. But unlike so many of cinema’s other wanderlust-driven young protagonists, Pearl does not shine the longer she is left out in the sun. Instead, she sours, and so do her dreams, which start out innocently enough before growing increasingly violent and disturbing. The film, in turn, gradually replaces its pristinely painted red barns, golden scarecrows, and other pieces of familiar Americana iconography with recurring images of rotting hogs and half-burnt corpses.

Eventually, no matter how hard she tries to suppress it, there’s nowhere for Pearl’s growing instability to go other than to the surface. Once it does, Pearl begins to indulge more in the kind of blood-soaked horror and brutality that X fans may have been expecting all along. However, as impactful as much of the violence is in Pearl ’s final third, it’s Goth’s red-faced, tear-streaked performance that ultimately takes center stage.

After opening with a delightfully macabre prologue, Pearl takes its time getting to the kind of violence and horror its story inherently promises. The film is a slow burn in a way that X very much wasn’t, which makes it far less superficially fun and rewatchable than West’s previous horror effort. Its second act, and especially the pace at which Pearl’s relationship with her mother develops, also drags in certain moments, which occasionally dulls the film’s overwhelming sense of unease.

But every time it seems like Pearl might get lost in the weeds of its own heightened vision of the past, Goth steps up and brings everything back into focus. The actress outdoes her work in X here, delivering a performance as Pearl ’s lead that elicits both pity and fear, often at the same time. Her performance is so central to Pearl , in fact, that the film essentially climaxes with a long monologue that plays out almost entirely in one unbroken close-up of Goth’s mascara-smudged face. The scene might be the best of Goth’s career so far, and it’s followed by an instance of cold-blooded brutality that might be the most technically impressive sequence West has ever pulled off (you’ll know it when you see it).

From there, Pearl achieves a kind of operatic quality that manages to mostly justify the prolonged build-up. Whether or not the film’s climax makes it as effective as that of X will, however, likely vary depending on the tastes of its viewers. X made a lasting impression because of how it pulled its tropes from the wells of various horror classics only to twist them in ways that were often surprising and darkly funny. Pearl , on the other hand, frequently draws inspiration from movies and stories that are, at most, only tangentially related to the horror genre.

The resulting film is a sun-soaked and vibrant slice of technicolor horror that’s both more technically impressive and subtler than X . The film presents its horrors more nakedly than X does, but it traffics in a sense of unease that is far less visceral than the straightforward, slasher-driven violence of its predecessor. Neither approach is more valid than the other, but it’s a testament to West’s control of his craft that Pearl manages to cast the spell that it does, one that makes it impossible to look away even when the film’s rotten truths are literally staring you in the face.

Pearl hits theaters on Friday, September 16.

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Where to Watch

Watch Pearl with a subscription on Paramount+, Netflix, rent on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV, or buy on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV.

What to Know

Pearl finds Ti West squeezing fresh gore out of the world he created with X -- and once again benefiting from a brilliant Mia Goth performance.

Pearl 's slightly bumpy plot is no match for the amazing Mia Goth, whose terrific performance takes Ti West's eerie atmosphere over the top.

Critics Reviews

Audience reviews, cast & crew.

David Corenswet

The Projectionist

Tandi Wright

Matthew Sunderland

Pearl's Father

Emma Jenkins-Purro

Movie Clips

‘Pearl’: Disturbed farm girl acts out in fantastically twisted prequel to the horror hit ‘X’

Mia goth delivers an electrifying and truly scary performance as a dreamer who’s like dorothy from ‘the wizard of oz,’ but homicidal..

In 1918, a young woman (Mia Goth) resents being in lockdown on the family farm and dreams of stardom in “Pearl.’’

Mia Goth frightens me.

Not the real-life British actress, as I’ve never met Ms. Goth and I’m sure she is a fine and lovely human being. I’m talking about Mia Goth in “Pearl,” in which she delivers an electrifying and truly scary performance as the title character in a fantastically twisted origins story about one of the more memorable psychopaths in recent movie history.

When Goth as Pearl plasters a frozen smile on her face and her eyes go wide, her expression is reminiscent of Anthony Perkins at the end of “Psycho” or Sissy Spacek during the prom scene carnage in “Carrie.” She’s looking at us, she’s looking through us, she’s seeing things in her mind we don’t really want to know about.

Just six months ago, Ti West delivered a raunchy, gritty and genuinely terrifying “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” tribute with “X,” which was set in 1979 and featured Goth in the dual roles as the young aspiring porn actress Maxine Minx and the creepy, salacious and bloodthirsty old Pearl, who along with her husband Howard is hell-bent on murdering Maxine and the cast and crew of the porn movie they’re shooting on the property belonging to Pearl and Howard. With “Pearl,” director West (who co-wrote the script with Goth) takes us all the way back to 1918 for the character’s origins story, which plays like a demented cross between “The Wizard of Oz,” “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane,” the aforementioned “Psycho” and “Joker.”

Whereas so many films set in the World War I era feature sepia-toned or monochromatic visuals, director West and cinematographer Eliot Rockett infuse “Pearl” with rich and saturated Technicolor tones, with the sweeping orchestral score by Tyler Bates and Tim Williams adding to the feeling of a Douglas Sirk melodrama. (There are some flights-of-imagination numbers as well that add to this unsettling juxtaposition of Hollywood fantasy and horror film.)

Zipping around on her bicycle, doing chores around the lonely family farm and even having quite the bizarre encounter with a scarecrow, young Pearl is like a bizarro version of Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz.” Unlike the wide-eyed optimist Dorothy, however, Pearl is clearly unhinged, as evidenced by her tendency to kill small animals for amusement, bathe in front of her infirm father (Matthew Sunderland) and talk to the voracious alligator in the nearby lake as if he’s an old buddy in a Disney movie.

Pearl is also deeply resentful of her lot in life. The Spanish flu is running rampant through the world, essentially placing Pearl on lockdown. She’s increasingly angry with her absentee husband Howard (Alistair Sewell), who is off fighting in the war abroad, and she’s forever clashing with her stern German immigrant mother (Tandi Wright), who hisses at Pearl, “Malevolence is festering inside you. I can see it, and I will not let you leave this farm again.”

Mom’s not wrong.

Nevertheless, Pearl does wander off the farm from time to time, chasing her delusional dreams of becoming a star. “One day the whole world’s gonna know my name,” she says, looking into the mirror. She loves escaping into the world of motion pictures at the movie theater in town, and she strikes up a relationship with the relatively sophisticated projectionist (David Corenswet), a handsome bounder who shows Pearl a crude, European-made stag film and seduces Pearl with lofty tales of the great big world out there.

When Pearl’s only friend, her bubbly and kind sister-in-law Misty (Emma Jenkins-Purro), tells her about local tryouts for a traveling dance troupe, Pearl believes this will be her big break — but as quickly becomes apparent in a disturbingly wacko audition performance that plays like a dark carnival version of “Flashdance,” Pearl is going nowhere fast, and let’s just say when Pearl feels let down or disappointed or betrayed, someone’s going to pay the price.

“Pearl” isn’t really about the jump scares and tropes we see in so many horror films. It’s more of a case study of a disturbed mind going completely off the rails, filled with ghastly images (you can imagine what happens to a roast pig left on the porch for days) and exquisitely constructed tension-build moments, as when poor Misty tries to offer words of comfort and encouragement to Pearl, and slowly begins to realize her sister-in-law is NOT well, and Misty needs to figure out a way to leave the farmhouse as quickly as possible.

(This is that relatively rare film in this genre where the supporting characters feel like fully dimensional people. Even Pearl’s cruel mother has a moment where she laments how this is not how she envisioned her life turning out when she was young and in love with Pearl’s father.)

With Mia Goth’s brilliant work carrying the brunt of the load, “Pearl” is one of the most effectively unsettling movies of the year.

John Fitzgerald, right, received a Schwinn bike for his seventh birthday in 1950.

Pearl Harbor

"Pearl Harbor" is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle. Its centerpiece is 40 minutes of redundant special effects, surrounded by a love story of stunning banality. The film has been directed without grace, vision, or originality, and although you may walk out quoting lines of dialog, it will not be because you admire them.

The filmmakers seem to have aimed the film at an audience that may not have heard of Pearl Harbor, or perhaps even of World War Two. This is the Our Weekly Reader version. If you have the slightest knowledge of the events in the film, you will know more than it can tell you. There is no sense of history, strategy or context; according to this movie, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor because America cut off its oil supply, and they were down to an 18 month reserve. Would going to war restore the fuel sources? Did they perhaps also have imperialist designs? Movie doesn't say.

So shaky is the film's history that at the end, when Jimmy Doolittle's Tokyo raiders crash-land in China, they're shot at by Japanese patrols with only a murky throwaway explanation about the Sino-Japanese war already underway. I predict some viewers will leave the theater sincerely confused about why there were Japanese in China.

As for the movie's portrait of the Japanese themselves, it is so oblique that Japanese audiences will find little to complain about apart from the fact that they play such a small role in their own raid. There are several scenes where the Japanese high command debates military tactics, but all of their dialog is strictly expository; they state facts but do not emerge with personalities or passions. Only Admiral Yamamoto (Mako) is seen as an individual, and his dialog seems to have been singled out with the hindsight of history. Congratulated on a brilliant raid, he demurs, "A brilliant man would find a way not to fight a war." And later, "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant." Do you imagine at any point the Japanese high command engaged in the 1941 Japanese equivalent of exchanging high-fives and shouting "Yes!" while pumping their fists in the air? Not in this movie, where the Japanese seem to have been melancholy even at the time about the regrettable need to play such a negative role in such a positive Hollywood film.

The American side of the story centers on two childhood friends from Tennessee with the standard-issue screenplay names Rafe McCawley ( Ben Affleck ) and Danny Walker ( Josh Hartnett ). They enter the Army Air Corps and both fall in love with the same nurse, Evelyn Johnson ( Kate Beckinsale )--first Rafe falls for her, and then, after he is reported dead, Danny. Their first date is subtitled " Three Months Later" and ends with Danny, having apparently read the subtitle, telling Evelyn, "Don't let it be three months before I see you again, okay?" That gets almost as big a laugh as her line to Rafe, "I'm gonna give Danny my whole heart, but I don't think I'll ever look at another sunset without thinking of you." That kind of bad laugh would have been sidestepped in a more literate screenplay, but our hopes are not high after an early newsreel report that the Germans are bombing "downtown London"--a difficult target, since although there is such a place as "central London," at no time in 2,000 years has London ever had anything described by anybody as a "downtown." There is not a shred of conviction or chemistry in the love triangle, which results after Rafe returns alive to Hawaii shortly before the raid on Pearl Harbor and is angry at Evelyn for falling in love with Danny, inspiring her timeless line, "I didn't even know until the day you turned up alive--and then all this happened." Evelyn is a hero in the aftermath of the raid, performing triage by using her lipstick to separate the wounded who should be treated from those left to die. In a pointless stylistic choice, director Michael Bay and cinematographer John Schwartzman shoot some of the hospital scenes in soft focus, some in sharp focus, some blurred. Why? I understand it's to obscure details deemed too gory for the PG-13 rating. (Why should the carnage at Pearl Harbor be toned down to PG-13 in the first place?) In the newsreel sequences, the movie fades in and out of black and white with almost amusing haste, while the newsreel announcer sounds not like a period voice but like a Top-40 deejay in an echo chamber.

The most involving material in the film comes at the end, when Jimmy Doolittle ( Alec Baldwin ) leads his famous raid on Tokyo, flying Army bombers off the decks of Navy carriers and hoping to crash-land in China.

He and his men were heroes, and their story would make a good movie (and indeed has: "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo"). Another hero in the movie is the African-American cook Dorie Miller (Cuba Gooding Jr.), who because of his race was not allowed to touch a gun in the racist pre-war Navy, but opens fire during the raid, shoots down two planes, and saves the life of his captain. He's shown getting a medal. Nice to see an African-American in the movie, but the almost total absence of Asians in 1941 Hawaii is inexplicable.

As for the raid itself, a little goes a long way. What is the point, really, of more than half an hour of planes bombing ships, of explosions and fireballs, of roars on the soundtrack and bodies flying through the air and people running away from fighters that are strafing them? How can it be entertaining or moving when it's simply about the most appalling slaughter? Why do the filmmakers think we want to see this, unrelieved by intelligence, viewpoint or insight? It was a terrible, terrible day. Three thousand died in all. This is not a movie about them.

It is an unremarkable action movie; Pearl Harbor supplies the subject, but not the inspiration.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.