The year without a master 2022 introduced us to a vital new filmmaking team in writer/director Ti West and actress Mia Goth, who gave us the two best horror films of the year in unknown and its sequel/prequel, Pearl (Now available on Netflix). Brief summary: unknown It was the touching story of a film crew who shot a porn movie with almost no budget in an incredibly… The Texas Chain Saw Massacre-farm inspired by the film, and meeting a grotesque fate thanks to the old peasant couple who live there; Goth played both the porn star and the homicidal old lady who does the old hack ‘n’ slash. unknown It earned praise for being weird, funny and fabulously creepy, West revealed that it had been filmed back-to-back with Pearlwhich debuted a few months later, co-written by and starring Goth again as the homicidal old lady, except it’s her origin story, the story of how she came to be a person of, shall we say, questionable moral fiber. And Goth kills in it, and I mean that literally, since Pearl It’s a horror movie at its core, and I mean that in the figurative, cliché sense: this is her star performance and, as far as I’m concerned, she was robbed of an Oscar nomination. And, guess what, it’s actually a trilogy, with the 80s porn horror movie. MaXXXina now in our lives, but first, let’s get into the nitty-gritty. Pearland Goth’s masterful performance.
PEARLSTREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The essence: Pearl (Goth) is all dolled up in her Sunday best. She poses in front of the mirror. She smiles and wears ribbons in her hair. The strings of the score blare and the opening titles play in cheerful cursive, but it’s not all flowers and puppies for Pearl. Her mother, Ruth (Tandi Wright), is a sorrowful woman who can’t stand joy. Happiness is something that’s just out of reach. In a harsh German accent, she nags Pearl to take off those old clothes and take her laundry to the barn and do her chores. Pearl has no one to really talk to except the cow, the sheep, maybe the goose. Her husband is off fighting in the War to End All Wars. Her father is wheelchair-bound, in a vegetative state, presumably a victim of the raging flu pandemic. She’s trapped on this farm. StuckAll Pearl has is the dream of becoming famous like the dancers in the movies that she sneaks off to see in the city when her mother doesn’t scold her for the constant misery. We are in 1918.
The next day, Ruth sends Pearl into town to get Dad’s medicine and rides off on her bike. She takes the bottle of morphine, sits down in a seat at the cinema, takes a nice drink (well, then!) and watches the dancers on the big screen. The movie is something… Madnessbecause every third film of the time had the word Madness In it, she meets the projectionist (David Corenswet, later cast as the next Superman), a nice guy who offers her a cigarette and a kind word and tells her to stop by again someday (for what, exactly? Hmm). On the way home, she comes across a scarecrow crucified in a cornfield. Now, I’ll stop summarizing for a moment to say that up to this point, the only hint we’ve had that Pearl isn’t quite right in the head is an earlier scene in which she’s picked up her trusty pitchfork and, rather nonchalantly and brutally, killed her goose and carried it to the end of the pier to feed to her “pet” alligator, Theda. She even comes when called, this trusty, oversized reptile. It’s not my place to reveal what happens to the scarecrow, but I will say that Pearl goes home with her hat on, which is the least of the encounter and further establishes our protagonist as an inpidual who exists somewhere on the spectrum between “eccentric” and “demonic.”
Of course, so we don’t forget, unknown It showed us that Pearl is a murderous madman even in her 80s, but not all murderous madmen were. always Crazy killers. Well, maybe Pearl always has been; it’s hard to say. Not every psychologically oppressed farm girl hangs out with an alligator named after the silent film star. Cleopatra (I had to Google it, to be honest), or she puts her hand on her sick father’s windpipe and gives it a test squeeze, or she does whatever the hell was going on in the scarecrow scene. But then Mama Ruth says she knows Pearl went to the movies because she was eight cents short of change at the drugstore, and Pearl lies and says she bought some candy, but that’s still a waste of money according to Ruth, so she sends her adult daughter to bed without dinner. Meanwhile, Pearl pins all her hopes for fame and adoration on a local audition for a traveling dancing troupe. How will she ever break free from matriarchal tyranny so she can walk out the door to audition? Full-blown psychopathy wouldn’t be his First option, but hey, to each his own, I guess.
What movies will it remind you of? Dorothy never did it that To the Scarecrow.
Performance worth watching: How many years is Pearl, exactly? Sometimes she seems childish, other times aggressive. womanishShe is innocent, but no, she is actually evil. She is wide-eyed, but corrupt. All of this happens at the same time, often in a single gothic expression. Her characterization here is exquisite: brave and funny, empathetic while also breathtakingly depraved.
Memorable dialogue: Pearl experiences a moment of self-awareness: “I don’t feel…” Well.”
Sex and skin: Some glimpses into what real-life historians believe may be the first real-life pornographic film. A free trip.
Our opinion: Moving away from the sloppy aesthetics of unknownThe West provides Pearl With the cheerful hues and vibrant primary colors of Hollywood Technicolor, an open and almost crass use of irony in the service of a bloody, violent story about an unexplainable evil. It’s a juxtaposition of old-time melodrama and modern-day arthouse horror film that, without its inspired central performance, could be an overwrought, calculated pastiche. But Goth is the glue that holds it together, elevating the film from material about destroying something beautiful to a multi-layered character drama. Think of Joaquin Phoenix’s Oscar-winning antiheroic performance in Jokerbut subtler and more dynamic in tone, and funnier. Much funnier, and therefore much edgier. Goth finds the sweetest spot between the tragic and the comic, the empathetic and the repulsive, taking us on her psychotornado ride, and when we land we’re giddy and euphoric, and definitely not in Kansas anymore.
Pearl is structured as a handful of gruesome kill scenes connected by vigorous stretches of melodrama. In horror movie parlance, the kills are unpleasant and sometimes even joyful, and countThe goose baits, the scarecrow sets the bait, and about halfway through, the entire project relies on Goth. Rather than lining up the victims and letting Pearl play Lizzy Borden, Goth and West mull over the age-old nature-versus-nurture debate; is her illness created by her unfortunate circumstances, or is it an almost supernatural force that encourages suffering so it can feed off of it? The idea is sparked in an inevitable mother-daughter dinnertime confrontation, which turns into revelatory hysteria as horror and melodrama join hands and dance to the unnerving dirge.
And that’s just the beginning for Goth. She’s the subject of many harrowing close-ups in which Pearl’s inner torment silently screams through unblinking eyes and a disturbing rictus: the audition sequence, a masterfully executed confessional monologue and the final shot, which holds and holds and holds until we can’t take it anymore. It’s a Goth horror performance that stands out and disturbs like few before it.
Our calling: STREAM IT and then turn it on unknown and MaXXXina.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
