Mark Reviews Movies: PEARL (2022)

Pearl, A24

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 15, 2022

In addition to its dark humor and balance of seemingly conflicting tones, writer/director Ti West's X did present a fairly intriguing villain. She was an elderly farmer's also-older wife, whose murderous instincts are seemingly enflamed by the mere notion of youth, as well as all of the freedom and possibility that being young can hold. Only six months after the release of that horror tale, West returns to the setting and that surprisingly sorrowful villain in Pearl, a prequel that's set on the same Texas farm about 60 years before the original film. That future mass killer is on the farm then, too, as a woman yearning for the freedom and all of the possibility that being young should afford her.

This movie isn't as effective as its predecessor, although it is, to be fair, doing something completely different than that film. To start, its aims and technique are far more simple and straightforward in terms of narrative, characters, and, especially, tone. Just as West played with the plotting and aesthetics of 1970s horror movies in the previous film, this one does toy with a familiar style and genre of its own, namely the Technicolor melodramas of the 1950s.

West, returning as co-writer and director, and cinematographer Eliot Rockett hit us with bright, rich pastel colors and almost unnaturally ample light from the first shot. The barn doors of the farm open to reveal a familiar sight: the farmhouse where, several decades after this story set in 1918, multiple people will meet gruesomely bloody ends. Some people will meet grisly deaths before the end of this tale, to be sure, but at the beginning, all we know of the farm is the future, when it's dilapidated, in disrepair, and overgrown. Our first vision of the farm here is of a vivid yellow house between a sky painted in blues and pinks. It looks like a lovely, idyllic place—except for what we already know is coming to it sooner or later or, for that matter, both.

That's one of the inherent problems here and, in general, with any kind of attempted origin story of a horror slasher such as the title character in this movie. To some degree, we know exactly what's coming, and in terms of the specifics that might not be clear, the big question is whether or not we want or even need to know those details. The mystery of someone like this eponymous character in West's original film is part of what makes such a villain so frightening.

Does it matter that Pearl, played again by Mia Goth (If one didn't know the actor played the older version of the character in the first film, here's that belated tidbit of information), was desperate to become a dancer in the motion pictures, that she had an overbearing mother (played by Tandi Wright) and an infirmed father (played by Matthew Sunderland), or that the husband who will try to clean up her murderous mess in about six decades was overseas fighting in the Great War? Such a story exists primarily to explain, and the explanation here, like so many rationales for fictional killers, is underwhelming.

Pearl kills in the future because she is, to put it in bluntly non-clinical terms, a psychopath whose jealousy and rage are triggered by some frisky young people. In this story set at the start of her murderous ways, she eventually kills because a series of pressures and disappointments trigger her jealousy and rage, revealing that she is a psychopath. In terms of the story, the movie is a trip toward a foregone conclusion, and nothing we learn is nothing we didn't know and really didn't need to know from the start.

With all of that out of the way, West's movie, co-written with Goth, is a somewhat admirable exercise in style and the bleak humor of dramatic irony. We basically follow Pearl, who shatters the allure of the romantic backdrop by stabbing a goose with a pitchfork and feeding the carcass to the alligator in the nearby lake, in a descent from feeling lonely, cooped-up, and unsatisfied with her fate to murdering assorted people for making her feel that way.

Some of the potential/inevitable victims include the parents, with the mother being a particularly nasty destroyer of dreams and self-esteem, as well as a local movie house projectionist (played by David Corenswet), who promises an escape, and the absent husband's sister Misty (a genuinely endearing Emma Jenkins-Purro), who promises to stick by her sister-in-law no matter what. There are famous last words, but the fates here seem concocted out unfortunately misguided sentiments.

Freed of the makeup and prosthetics that transformed her into the older version of this character, Goth is subversively sweet at first, only to become sinister in her smiles and sadness once the violence begins. It's a dedicated performance, but this character is ultimately as redundant as the lengthy monologue in which Pearl explains how she has been feeling this whole time (It's shot in one take, which only highlights how little it has to say and how often it says the same thing). The shortcomings of Pearl aren't in her abilities as a performer or in West's skill as a stylist. The two have just written a movie that, while admirably crafted, doesn't quite justify its existence in the first place.

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