Pearl Review: Horror Prequel Makes X Even Better Than It Already Was

Ti West’s “Pearl” is an oddity amongst horror sequels and prequels.

The actual fact of its existence just isn’t the outstanding half (since, again when there have been video shops, you can throw a pitchfork and possibly hit a movie like “Witchcraft XIII: Blood of the Chosen” or “The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia”). What’s really extraordinary is that “Pearl” is greater than only a incredible prequel: it efficiently illuminates and recontextualizes its predecessor, dramatically enhancing a movie that was already acclaimed to start with.

“Pearl” is a prequel to West’s retro slasher “X,” which takes place within the Nineteen Seventies and follows a gaggle of impartial filmmakers who lease a cabin on a farm from an aged couple. Their mission is clandestine, to secretly movie a pornographic film starring Maxine Minx (Mia Goth, “Emma.”) underneath the farmers’ noses. However after they’re not having spirited debates about sex-positivity, they’re getting murdered one-by-one by Pearl (additionally performed by Goth), an previous girl who longs for her sexual prime.

Whereas distinctively fashionable and comparatively sensible, it’s exhausting to look at “X” by itself with out getting the impression that, as a lot as West’s movie believes in sexual liberation, it additionally expects its viewers to be grossed out by the fundamental idea of aged individuals as sexual beings. There’s a smattering of thematic hypocrisy that West did a disappointingly superficial job of exploring within the first film.

“Pearl” takes place in 1918, on the tail finish of World Conflict I and in the course of the lethal flu pandemic which killed greater than 615,000 individuals in america alone. So of us are staying at house, terrified of interacting with others and carrying masks to guard themselves from an infection. (What a coincidence!)

Mia Goth once more performs Pearl, a younger girl whose husband is serving abroad and who’s caught staying together with her overbearing mom Ruth (Tandi Wright, “Love and Monsters”) and her immobilized, ailing father (Matthew Sunderland, “The Nightingale”). Pearl desires, like so many younger ladies on farms in films, of leaving her remoted and unremarkable life. She thinks she might be a dancer and aspires to audition for a musical church revue that would take her out of her oppressive familial jail and into the nice large world of present enterprise.

Pearl is a creature of passionate needs however barely-bridled fury. Her libido is raging and has no outlet in any way, to the extent that native scarecrows turn into her playthings. And whereas she talks to the varied animals on her farm like they have been her finest pals, proper out of a Disney fairy story, she additionally kills them when the temper requires it, feeding them to the man-eating alligator she has within the river out again.

In “Pearl,” West and Goth (who additionally co-wrote the screenplay) are drawing a reasonably uncomfortable parallel between the romanticized repression we so usually discover in Hollywood melodramas and the gradual activation of a serial killer. It’s a connection that permeates each scene and shot, and to wonderful impact. “X” cinematographer Eliot Rockett’s overwhelmingly colourful and luxurious cinematography offers the nightmarish violence of “Pearl” an attractively Technicolor aesthetic. “Pearl” is to 1950’s Douglas Sirk what “X” was to 1970’s porn.

West and Goth aren’t merely clarifying Pearl’s motivations; they’re critiquing an leisure business that sells intercourse underneath the guise of wholesomeness. The dancing movies Pearl watches on the native theater are little greater than an excuse to indicate some leg, and as she will get to know the good-looking and flirtatious projectionist (David Corenswet, “Look Each Methods”), he introduces her to the underground world of early pornography, stripping away the façade of mainstream morality altogether.

Goth performs Pearl with, at first, an astounding quantity of restraint. She’s attempting, genuinely attempting, to be the individual her mom needs her to be. The individual her husband needs her to be. The individual the flicks need her to be. However in a gloriously carried out centerpiece, an argument together with her mom escalates into an occasion that can’t be undone, leaving Pearl with just one possibility: to commit wholeheartedly to her profession in present enterprise, and in addition to commit to a lot and much and many murders.

“Pearl” is a genuinely horrifying movement image, and whereas West is undeniably staging the motion, Goth is the one working the best wonders. Her portrayal is unbearably unhappy and breathtakingly scary, usually at the exact same time, culminating in one of many 12 months’s nice one-take horror monologues (Andrew Semans’ “Resurrection” has the opposite) and at the very least one different shot that may stick to you whereas the credit roll, most likely past.

The movie could be fabulous in a vacuum, however watched together with “X” — the place we see how Pearl ended up after 50 years — it provides poignancy to the general saga. Pearl’s desires of leaving the farm have been, clearly, completely ruined by her murderous compulsions and her want to stay in isolation. And the parallels between Maxine’s ambitions and sexual liberation, and Pearl’s personal failed journey, make “X” work on extra considerate and tragic ranges than it did all by itself.

The sexuality that appeared determined to evoke immature screams of grossed-out terror in “X” come throughout much less like mere misguided ageism now, and extra just like the pure fruits of a protracted life spent perpetually craving bodily pleasure, morally or immorally, by no means ceasing, proper till the top. (Perhaps if “Pearl” had come out first, “X” wouldn’t have felt fairly so thematically disjointed and ageist within the first place, nevertheless it’s too late for that now.)

“Pearl” isn’t simply nice; it retroactively makes its predecessor nice, too. It’s a good-looking and unhappy horror drama, with scenes and photographs and performances that may make you surprise in the event you’re presupposed to snigger, cry or shriek. Till you notice that the perfect a part of this movie is that you’re completely presupposed to do all three. And also you most likely will.

“Pearl” opens in US theaters Sept. 16 by way of A24.