Movies: Pearl
Until this year, I was "meh" on Ti West's horror films. He directed The House of the Devil in 2009, which a lot of people really love, and I thought was good but a little boring. Then, he directed The Innkeepers in 2011 which I found really boring. He also directed The Sacrament in 2013, which was much better.
Nine years later, he comes out with not one, but two horror films in one year that blew my fucking doors off! In March, we got X, which takes place in the late 1970s and is about a crew of adult filmmakers who rent a guest house on a farm from an elderly couple and secretly make a porno. I gave the movie a B+ when I first saw it, but upon rewatching it, I changed that grade to an A-. It's a really fun and funny slasher that also squeezes in some Deep Thoughts about aging and sexuality. Notably, actress Mia Goth plays both porn actress Maxine *and* the elderly woman Pearl, who murders everyone.
Well, only a few months later, West comes out with a prequel to X about Pearl herself. Once again, Mia Goth plays the character, who we now see as a young woman. Pearl takes place in 1918, 61 years before the events of X. Pearl is probably somewhere between the ages of 18 and 22 in this movie, although she seems much younger--mostly due to Mia Goth simply looking young for her age, but also due to Pearl's immaturity and selfishness.
But it's hard to blame Pearl for these qualities, as she lives on an isolated farm with her incredibly strict immigrant mother (a German immigrant, to boot. Germans weren't looked too kindly on during WWI) and her catatonic father. Pearl is also married to a man named Howard, who is serving in the war.
Times are tough for Pearl: an influenza pandemic is sweeping the nation, her husband isn't there to support her, she has to feed and bathe her father and do a ton of farm chores, and her mother won't even allow her the money to go to the moving pictures, which is her favorite activity. Pearl wants to be a dancer and dreams of being in movies. But she is also aware that she's...different. She describes it as "I don't have something that other people have".
Pearl is filmed in gorgeous technicolor, with references to The Wizard of Oz as well as the films of Douglas Sirk. Sirk's films focus on women who are unsatisfied with their lot in life and were sometimes called "weepies". Movies like All That Heaven Allows and Imitation of Life are good examples to check out. And interestingly enough, although Pearl is a horror film, most of the movie is more of a mixture of the "women's weepies" genre plus some absurd comedy. The bodies don't start piling up until the second half of the movie.
Pearl is so much fun. It's a good movie if you're dipping your toes into horror but don't want a lot of jump scares or really intense gore (there is some gore, but I didn't find it gratuitous). Mia Goth is delightfully unhinged as a young, psychopathic woman. Her needs and desires are more important than everyone else's and she will stop at nothing--including murder--to get her way. She's also just so darn cute!
With so many horror movies these days trying to be "about" something (and nothing wrong with that), it's nice to see a horror movie that is just fun, but not in a way that sacrifices quality. Pearl is much better than a low-budget slasher, but it's also much less intense than, say, an Ari Aster film. Highly recommended (alongside X) for longtime fans of horror and those just getting into the genre.
Grade: A
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