If you’ve seen “X,” Ti West’s inventive and heartfelt pastiche of ’70s horror and hardcore porn, you know that Mia Goth does double duty. (Spoilers ahead if you haven’t seen it.) She’s Maxine, an aspiring movie star and named survivor of a rural murder case. She is also the wife of a horny and murderous farmer named Pearl, who has done many murders.
In “Pearl”, which Goss wrote with West, she repeats the role, playing Pearl as a horny, murderous farmer’s daughter. It’s not a dirty joke setting – this prequel, set in 1918, isn’t quite as dirty a movie as ‘X’ was going to be. The atmosphere of silly melodrama is fermented with humor-aware winks and held together by Goth’s utterly earnest and surprisingly bizarre performance.
More than 50 years before the events of ‘X’, Pearl lived on the same Texas farm. Squeaky yellow houses, cavernous barns and ponds with hungry alligators. Her life is a never-ending cycle of struggle and frustration. Her husband, Howard, has gone off to war, leaving her with her parents: her pious and autocratic German mother (Tandy Wright) and her father, who has been incapacitated by the flu. (Matthew Sunderland). Her money is running low and Pearl sneaks off to the movies while she runs errands in town.
She dreams of running away to pursue a career in photography and practices her song and dance routines in anticipation of her big break. She also practices what we know from ‘X’ and becomes one of her later professions: when a goose wanders into the barn and sees her funny face, she kills the goose Poke it with a pitchfork and let the crocodile eat it. The “pearl” arc represents her progress up the food chain, from poultry to human prey.
The gore is at least as horrifying as the massacre in ‘X’, but ‘Pearl’ occupies a different corner of the slasher movie universe. It’s not particularly suspenseful – the killer’s identity is never questioned, and her victims don’t elicit much sympathy – but it has a strange, hallucinogenic intensity. Flashy and banal, the music (by Tyler Bates and Tim Williams) frenzied and ominous, but the film is too sincere, too kind to its idiosyncratic heroine, to make camp I can’t see
A little thin and undercooked, Goth’s performance pushes it past its limits. Pearl falls into an affair with her local movie theater projectionist (David Corenswet), who introduces her to French porn and seduces her with the promise of a bohemian life free from the constraints of her small town. captivate She moans around her parents to distract her and tries to befriend her with her wholesome blonde stepsister (Emma Jenkins Puro). Through it all, Pearl struggles with her stifling social and domestic expectations and her irrepressible thirst for freedom, fame and erotic liberation.
Speaking of goth, you might think of a young Judy Garland. Shelley Duvall ’70s, or of the demon-possessed Raggedy Ann doll, but she has her own fearless and outspoken intensity. I want you to see that I am also a heroine beyond. Goth makes you believe it. or otherwise.
pearl
Rated R. Stay away from barns and basements. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. at the theater.