I’ve seen Mia Goth in a bunch of horror films where she seemed good but the film was gash. Finally she gets a chance to shine in Pearl.
Pearl is the prequel to X, which I wanted to see but haven’t yet seen, but since it comes first chronologically in the series, you can start with Pearl without needing to see X. Set in 1918, Pearl is a young farmgirl in Texas who dreams of leaving home to become a star. There’s also something wrong with her, like really wrong.
Pearl is shot as a big Technicolour spectacular, everything rich reds and greens, with an ostentatious score. This is Pearl’s story, and she is the star of her own glorious epic. The thing it’s most evocative of is The Wizard of Oz – during hard times in rural America, a young girl with big dreams is in the prelude to an amazing adventure.
But what Pearl doesn’t realise yet, she’s not in some feel-good showstopper, she’s in a horror. She is the horror. Because Pearl isn’t right. She kills a goose and feeds it to an alligator during the opening credits. And her daydreaming about cinema stardom frequently tilts into the unhinged, until finally careening into monomania.
What’s quite the feat is the film manages to keep Pearl sympathetic, long after her actions no longer warrant it, helped greatly by Mia Goth’s tender but frantic performance. She has a long monologue just before the film closes, and despite everything she’s done, everything you know she’s almost certainly about to do, she seems so small, so vulnerable, and lost, and you still feel for her. It’s just really well done.