102 min | R | September 16, 2022 | A24
Ti West shoots a slasher prequel as a Technicolor Hollywood melodrama. A farm girl named Pearl wants to dance her way off the family land and onto the silver screen. The screen is not interested, and Pearl does not take rejection well.
Pearl lives on an isolated Texas farm in 1918 while her husband fights overseas and the influenza pandemic keeps the world locked down. She tends animals, nurses her paralyzed father, and submits to a mother who treats ambition as sin. What she wants is to be a star, the kind she watches in the picture shows in town. Ti West builds the film as the origin story of the killer from X, but the real subject is the gap between what Pearl believes she deserves and what the world will give her. The horror does not come from a mask or a knife. It comes from a young woman who decides that other people are obstacles between her and the life she was promised.
Mia Goth plays Pearl as a child who never learned where her wants end. She smiles through a monologue that runs unbroken for minutes, confessing every ugly thing inside her, and Goth lets the smile crack into terror at her own honesty. She dances for an imagined audience with a desperation that turns charming into frightening. Tandi Wright plays Ruth, the mother, with German rigidity and buried grief that explains where Pearl learned her cruelty. David Corenswet plays the projectionist who offers Pearl a glimpse of escape and the European films that promise a wider world. Each scene partner exists to show Pearl a door, and Goth shows us the moment she decides to walk through every one of them by force.
West directs from a script he wrote with Goth, and the craft choices weaponize nostalgia. Eliot Rockett shoots the farm in saturated primaries and soft golden light that quotes The Wizard of Oz, then holds the camera on violence the genre it imitates would cut away from. Tyler Bates and Tim Williams compose a swelling orchestral score that belongs to a 1940s studio romance and refuses to acknowledge what is happening on screen. The dissonance is the point. The film looks like a love letter to old Hollywood while it documents what the dream factory does to the people it rejects.
Pearl works because it understands that the slasher villain is a person who wanted something and was told no. West and Goth refuse to make her a monster from the start. They show her as a girl with a face made for the camera and no camera willing to look. The film is a portrait of entitlement curdling into murder, told with the visual grammar of the movies Pearl worships. It earns its horror by making you understand her before it makes you fear her.