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Something is not right with Pearl ( Mia Goth ), and she’ll never understand why. She’s too set in her ways, like her need to perform on haystacks while dancing with a pitchfork, or murdering animals when no one is watching. She wants to get out of her isolated farm in 1918 Texas, and experience the love that comes from performing, in being seen as an entertainer but not your truest self. It’s not likely her future star profiles would ever mention that she once impaled a duck with a pitchfork and then fed it to her best friend, an alligator (as we see when her name splashed across the screen in the opening credits).

Ti West ’s “Pearl” is about how frightening actors can be as they feed that corrosive need to be seen at all costs. So it’s fitting that this movie’s most brilliant moment, its final shot (not a spoiler, as we know she makes it to 1979 in West's “ X ”), is from Goth using her face to disturbing ends. It’s a wide, forced smile; her teeth signal happiness, while her sporadically twitching facial muscles and welling tears say something much scarier, all while frozen in that desperation. West makes us stare at it during the closing credits. It’s all wildly, wonderfully discomforting, and one wishes this character study strove for that effect more often while telling a story that’s not as nuanced as its final, silent call for help.

But for how obvious the plotting and dialogue can be from co-writers West and Goth in painting a portrait of a monster, it’s fun to interpret Pearl’s proclamations throughout her film as actor/serial killer double-speak: “The whole world is going to know my name,” “I don't like reality,” “All I want is to be loved.” Goth makes these revelations count in primal showcases, expressed with a breathy, heavily accented voice that’s meant to make her sound kind of naive and very much innocent, a carbon copy of the countless Pearls out there. A long-running close-up of Goth later on takes us on a wild ride of her anxieties about not being loved, her fears of her true self, unaware that the sudden turn within her is near, especially after someone makes her feel small. Then they suffer for it.

Those who remember this year’s “X” will remember the farm where a handful of adult film folk died, and Goth’s elderly version of Pearl, who was often naked and rebuffed and took it all very personally for a course of events a la “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.” The few kills in “Pearl” are more calculated, and come as climaxes to scenes of anger, rejection, and her own frustrations. West makes those moments count, creating dread out of a camera’s movement (slowly spinning at one point, waiting for Pearl to pop into frame), while his editing then has its own brutality. Usually taking place in daylight and within Pearl’s psychosis, they’re meant to be played as dark comedy. That very mix of tone doesn’t hit as poignantly as it wants to, but the kills are effectively bracing.

The house is treated with similar shots as in “X,” but the cinematography by Eliot Rockett presents it in glowing Technicolor, a storybook world of potential—bright green grass, a blood-red farmhouse, blue sky overalls on Pearl as she dreams of getting away. Things are less luminous inside the home, where Pearl’s life of isolation and grave unhappiness is no anomaly: her father ( Matthew Sunderland ) is literally in a wheelchair, sick and wordless, and always needs tending to. And while “Pearl” is a monster movie, Goth’s character has a villain of her own, her mother Ruth, portrayed with haunting disgust this side of “ Mommie Dearest ” by an incredible Tandi Wright .

Repression is evil’s trick in “X” and now “Pearl”; it makes connection, pleasure, and so much that is fruitful all the more out of reach. It gets people killed. Ruth helps make sense of the horror in this world, in a staggering centerpiece scene that lays it all out on a dinner table: she rips apart Pearl’s hopes of ever leaving, projects comments of failure onto her, and screams about her own immense dissatisfaction with life that she has accepted. Her words are visceral, and they seem to control the thunderstorms that boom from the outside. It's an apt turning point for Pearl, and an excellent display for both Goth and Wright.

Pearl finds an escape from all of this in the movies—even just the thought of being in one. When her father needs more medicine, she goes to town and gets to actually watch one, inspiring her dreams of being the smiling dancing woman in the frame. She also meets a dashing projectionist ( David Corenswet ), who makes her feel like she could be a movie star, although she later finds out what kind of movies he means, and what he wants from her. Pearl remains as naive as she is needy as she tells him in wistful terms about wanting to be a star. It's here that we simply have to trust Goth and West’s dedication to this character and believe that they're rooting for her in the end.

West's film takes place in a world that is sick, as the Spanish Flu has reached the states, causing people to wear masks and be isolated. That’s a stronger period element than the movie’s presentation; there’s a nagging effect that in spite of the production design—those cars, dresses, and even a full-out dance sequence—that the movie is so self-amused it’s practically baiting people who go to old movies in theaters to laugh at the niceties and mannerisms of earlier eras. It can be accomplished in other facets, like the gorgeous wall-to-wall score by Tyler Bates and Tim Williams that kicks off with a sumptuous main theme, but the aesthetic gambit of “Pearl” registers more as being cute than immersive.

There are just too many moments in which the sincerity of “Pearl” is questionable. Yes, it gives Goth a compelling chance to nurture a fascinating character, to show a performer’s heart and needs, for us to clock her emotional reactions like the steps of a slasher. But the execution of “Pearl” is shakier in what it wants us to take from her delusions, her violent outbursts, her yearning for love. “Pearl” gets a little too close to letting you simply laugh at her. We know she wouldn’t like that.

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Nick Allen is the former Senior Editor at RogerEbert.com and a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Pearl (2022)

Rated R for some strong violence, gore, strong sexual content and graphic nudity.

102 minutes

Mia Goth as Pearl

David Corenswet as The Projectionist

Tandi Wright as Mother

Matthew Sunderland as Father

Emma Jenkins-Purro as Mitzy

Alistair Sewell as Howard

Writer (based on characters created by)

Cinematographer.

Eliot Rockett
Tyler Bates
Tim Williams

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Pearl Reviews

West and Goth beautifully translate the chilling dichotomy between good and evil with several allusions to The Wizard of Oz, as well as a general nod to the saccharine quality of old Disney films.

Full Review | Jul 20, 2024

Pearl the character may not be a star, but “Pearl” the movie is an absolute blast!

Full Review | Jul 17, 2024

Aesthetics aside, a movie like Pearl lives and dies off the lead performance, and Mia Goth delivers a show-stopping performance here.

Full Review | Original Score: 8.5/10 | Jul 12, 2024

Mia Goth dominates the film, given pretty much the entire screen to fill and the runtime to stretch her legs – this is entirely her domain and as Pearl she gives a horror performance for the ages.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 5, 2024

All in all, "Pearl" doesn’t disappoint. While the film’s premise ponders the obsessive ambition and showcases its aftermath, the performances and costume design will impress scene after scene.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Jun 22, 2024

For someone that loves classic films, there was a lot to admire here. With the lush colors, nods to cinematic history and eccentric characters, this is a film that non-horror audiences would find appreciation for.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 19, 2024

West does a few things better than any director today. It is rare for a movie to show men being afraid before something happens

Full Review | Jun 2, 2024

As a prequel, it has some slasher moments that are amplified by Goth's sinister performance as the scream queen in the red dress, but unfortunately it frequents too many common places. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | May 17, 2024

Technically a prequel to his earlier slasher film X (2022), Ti West’s Pearl comfortably stands up on its own as a bold, imaginative, and hugely effective work of horror.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | May 4, 2024

My X-pectations were too high

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Apr 24, 2024

Ti West’s prequel cements the “X” Cinematic Universe as a force to be reckoned with.

Full Review | Nov 2, 2023

A mutli-layered exploration of womanhood in relation to exposure and performance.

Full Review | Original Score: 8.1/10 | Oct 29, 2023

To make all this work Pearl needs a star, and it has it in Goth, whose powerhouse performance elevates what could so easily be a cartoon villain.

Full Review | Sep 19, 2023

Pearl's journey mimics that of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. With a little more blood spatter than glittery shoes.

Full Review | Aug 6, 2023

You see West making more creative decisions and playing with different scenarios rather than sticking to the same old tricks up his sleeve. He reinvents himself, and with that comes a gem of a horror picture.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Jul 29, 2023

A great horror film that captures the dawning age of cinema beautifully well. Also has a great performance by Mia Goth that deserves all the awards she gets for her performance.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 22, 2023

The result is a successful contrast between a visual language with hints of a fairy tale and a dark story that hides delirium behind the fantasy. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Jun 30, 2023

Bathed in a Technicolor that yearns for happiness that will never come, Pearl's red hues enhance the call to the madness of this addictive delirium. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Jun 26, 2023

Instead of lining up the victims and letting Pearl get her Lizzy Borden on, Goth and West ruminate in the age-old debate of nature vs. nurture.

Full Review | May 16, 2023

While Ti West’s X was a smart, sassy homage to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and other rural horrors from the 1970s, it pales in comparison to the vivid Technicolor 1918 nightmare he and his star Mia Goth have unleashed here.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Apr 26, 2023

Supported by

‘Pearl’ Review: A Farmer’s Daughter Moves Up the Food Chain

A horror-movie killer gets a surprising origin story in Ti West’s prequel to “X.”

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By A.O. Scott

If you have seen “X,” Ti West’s ingenious and heartfelt pastiche of ’70s horror and hard-core pornography, you know that Mia Goth plays two roles. (If you haven’t seen it, there are spoilers ahead.) She is Maxine, an aspiring movie star and the designated survivor of a rural killing spree. Disguised by prosthetic makeup, she is also a horny and homicidal farmer’s wife named Pearl, and does a lot of killing.

In “Pearl,” which Goth wrote with West, she repeats that role, playing Pearl as a horny and homicidal farmer’s daughter. That’s not the setup for a dirty joke, and this prequel, set in 1918, is less of a dirty movie than “X” aspired to be. There is some sex and plenty of gore, but mostly an atmosphere of feverish, lurid melodrama leavened with winks of knowing humor and held together by Goth’s utterly earnest and wondrously bizarre performance.

More than 50 years before the events in “X,” Pearl lives on the same Texas farm, with its creaky yellow house, its cavernous barn, and a hungry alligator in the pond. Her life is an endless cycle of toil and frustration. Her husband, Howard, is away at war, leaving her alone with her parents: a pious, dictatorial German mother (Tandi Wright) and a father (Matthew Sunderland) who has been incapacitated by the flu. Money is scarce, and Pearl escapes by sneaking off to the movies while she’s running errands in town.

She dreams of running off to pursue a career in pictures, practicing song-and-dance routines in anticipation of a big break. She also practices what we know from “X” will be one of her later vocations. When a goose wanders into the barn and looks at her funny, she impales it on a pitchfork and feeds it to the alligator. The arc of “Pearl” charts her progress up the food chain, from poultry to human prey.

The bloodshed is at least as grisly as the slaughter in “X,” but “Pearl” occupies a different corner of the slasher-movie universe. It isn’t especially suspenseful — the identity of the killer is never in doubt, and her victims don’t elicit much sympathy — but it has a strange, hallucinatory intensity. The emotions and the colors are gaudy and overwrought, the music (by Tyler Bates and Tim Williams) is frenzied and portentous, but the film is too sincere, too tender toward its peculiar heroine, to count as camp.

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Entertainment /
Movie Review

Pearl is a slasher prequel that makes the original even better

A killer follow-up to x creates a promising new horror franchise.

By Andrew Webster , an entertainment editor covering streaming, virtual worlds, and every single Pokémon video game. Andrew joined The Verge in 2012, writing over 4,000 stories.

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If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.

When X came out earlier this year, it was a capable, well-crafted homage to ’70s slasher flicks from director Ti West, but there wasn’t much to it beyond that. It turns out the project is much bigger than that one-off story. As was teased at the end of X , we now have a prequel, Pearl , that tells the origin story of its titular bloodthirsty killer. On their own, the two films each offer a satisfying amount of scares and gore. But it’s when you put them together that they become much more intriguing.

This review contains spoilers for both Pearl and X.

X told the story of a group of young folks attempting to film a porn movie in a rented farmhouse before being steadily killed by the murderous elderly couple they were renting from. Pearl explains how that couple got so murderous. Its predecessor pulled liberally from classic horror movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre , but Pearl goes in a different direction. It’s much more like The Wizard of Oz. Only, you know, with lots of blood and guts.

Set in 1918, it stars Pearl (Mia Goth), a simple farm girl with dreams of being a star. Problem is, her husband (Alistair Sewell) is away fighting in World War I, her father (Matthew Sunderland) is sick with the Spanish flu, and her strict mother (Tandi Wright) needs Pearl’s help to keep their struggling farm going. Despite a seemingly cheery disposition, Pearl feels trapped. She sneaks out whenever she can to watch movies, dreaming of one day being a dancer on-screen. But it’s not long before the cracks start to show. Early on, she randomly kills a farm animal with a casual kind of blood lust, and later, she has a surprisingly intimate moment with a scarecrow. Something is wrong, and Pearl knows it. She just doesn’t know how to fix it.

Things really start to change when she meets the local projectionist (David Corenswet), a self-proclaimed Bohemian who introduces her to smut movies and the idea of living life for yourself. While her mother dismisses Pearl’s dreams, the projectionist actually supports them, fueling her desires. Soon after, her glamorous sister-in-law Misty (Emma Jenkins-Purro) convinces Pearl to audition for a local dance troupe. What follows is a series of unfortunate events that leads to Pearl ultimately becoming uncoupled from reality and taking her first steps into the wide world of being a slasher movie villain.

Pearl works as a standalone horror movie; the contrast between The Wizard of Oz vibe and the lurking dread builds a wonderful kind of tension and makes the moments of bloodshed hit that much harder. It helps that Goth turns in an incredible performance. She shines, particularly during a long, discomforting speech that sees her accept herself as well as the perfect yet painfully awkward credits sequence. Goth’s ability to swap between Pearl’s true self and the mask she wears in public is wonderful to watch.

But what really makes the movie interesting is how it builds on, and adds layers and texture to, its predecessor. X made it clear that Pearl was full of spite and envy, yearning for her younger days. But now, those motivations are much more clear, to the point that she almost becomes a sympathetic figure. We also see how her husband is roped into the whole endeavor and even get an origin story for the alligator. No matter which order you watch them in, each movie strengthens the other.

This isn’t an entirely new phenomenon, of course. Horror movies are often great at building up a mythology over the course of multiple films, whether it’s Friday the 13th or A Nightmare on Elm Street . But with Pearl and X , much like with Netflix’s Fear Street trilogy , there’s an intentionality that’s clear from the beginning. The mythology isn’t being created on the fly; it’s there from the start, waiting for you to put the pieces together.

There’s more on the way, too: Pearl will be followed by MaXXXine , a direct sequel to X (I know, the titles are confusing) that sees Goth reprise her other role of Maxine as she attempts to make it in LA. Based on the first teaser , it’s clear MaXXXine will have an ’80s vibe, adding another flavor to West’s growing slasher story — and giving Goth another chance to establish herself as one of horror’s most promising new villains.

Pearl is in theaters on September 16th. This review is based on a screening at the Toronto International Film Festival.

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Common Sense Says
Parents Say 10 Reviews
Kids Say 26 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Lots of blood and gore in darkly feminist horror prequel.

Parents Need to Know

Why Age 17+?

Extreme blood and gore. Imaginary image of soldier exploding, with blood and gor

Vintage "stag" film shown for nearly a minute depicts a man with two sexual part

Cigarette smoking. Main character drinks from bottle of morphine (medicine meant

A use of "stupid."

Any Positive Content?

Addresses the extremely limited options women had in the early 1900s, and throug

This is a woman-led story: The three strongest characters are women and, while n

No positive role models. The main character turns from victim to monster.

Violence & Scariness

Extreme blood and gore. Imaginary image of soldier exploding, with blood and gore spattering everywhere. Woman's dress catches on fire; she's severely burned. Character killed, stabbed in head with pitchfork; lots of blood. Another hacked up with an axe; lots of blood, body parts shown. Someone is smothered with a pillowcase. Dead bodies. Characters slap one another. Stabbing a goose with a pitchfork; dead, bloody goose shown. Gory war footage in movie theater newsreel. Rotting pig covered in maggots. Jump scares. Nightmare sequence. Characters eaten by alligator. Threatening with knife. Main character smashes an alligator egg. References to WWI and the Spanish flu. Character considers feeding father to alligator. Spoken reference to a dead infant. Spoken references to killing animals. Violent sobbing, utter despair.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Vintage "stag" film shown for nearly a minute depicts a man with two sexual partners; there's full nudity, sex, thrusting, etc. Married main character kisses another man and wakes up in bed with him (sex implied). Main character pretends to "make out" with scarecrow, tongue-kissing; she sits on top of him and brings herself to orgasm. Main character bathes in front of her non-responsive father (nothing graphic shown).

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Cigarette smoking. Main character drinks from bottle of morphine (medicine meant for her father).

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

Addresses the extremely limited options women had in the early 1900s, and throughout most of human history. Women with dreams may be forced to give them up to live a very narrow, preordained lifestyle not of their choosing. The movie rages against this system in a violent way.

Diverse Representations

This is a woman-led story: The three strongest characters are women and, while not especially admirable, are the ones who drive the story. Very few characters; all are White.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Positive Role Models

Parents need to know that Pearl is the horror prequel to Ti West 's X (2022). It's set decades earlier, in 1918, and tells the story of how the creepy elderly woman in the first movie became a homicidal maniac ( Mia Goth plays the character at both ages). It's extremely bloody and gory but well made and smart; it's really a dark feminist tale. Characters are brutally killed with axes and pitchforks, and body parts are severed. People are also severely burned, suffocated, eaten by an alligator, even blown up (flinging gory bits everywhere). There are jump scares and nightmares and a rotting pig covered in maggots. Several seconds of a vintage "stag" film are shown, with full nudity, thrusting, and sex. The married main character kisses another man and wakes up in his bed, with sex implied. She also kisses a scarecrow (using her tongue), then writhes on top of him, bringing herself to orgasm. There's cigarette smoking, and the main character takes a swig of morphine. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

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Parent and Kid Reviews

Parents say (10)
Kids say (26)

Based on 10 parent reviews

movie that leaves you feeling icky

just wow. at the end I had to sit on my bed and think I love movies that make you feel like you need a bath after not exactly scared that something’s gonna get you but a feeling of unease. be warned the last scene is pretty gory but other then that it’s not bad (the last scene isn’t the worst thing I’ve seen either if your sensitive then I’d recommend searching the ending first) there is a scene where Pearl roses a scarecrow and one of an old timey corn movie both very short and skipable. also making out also skipable a bit longer though. i highly recommend. also it’s Mia goth which should give you enough reason to watch!

What's the Story?

In PEARL, it's 1918 -- many decades before the events of X -- and young Pearl ( Mia Goth ) lives on a farm with her strict, stern mother ( Tandi Wright ) and her ailing father (Matthew Sunderland). Pearl is married to soldier Howard (Alistair Sewell) and is waiting for him to return from war. While she waits, Pearl dreams of being a dancer and seeing the world and being adored, but she feels stifled by her mother and her never-ending farm chores. During her rare trips to town, Pearl steals trips to the picture show to watch dance films. She meets the handsome, carefree projectionist ( David Corenswet ), who stirs something inside her. Then she learns from her sister-in-law, Mitzy (Emma Jenkins-Purro), about a dance contest at the local church; the winner gets to go on a tour. Pearl pins her every hope on winning the contest. If she doesn't, who knows what might happen?

Is It Any Good?

This prequel to X promises an origin story, and while it may leave off with more questions than answers, it's still a well-crafted gorefest and a vivid character study. Indeed, Ti West 's Pearl , which was co-written by its star, only suffers when taken together in context with its predecessor. Since the older Pearl appears in the 1979-set X , we know that, no matter what happens in this movie, she'll survive. But as the prequel ends, it doesn't really suggest how the 60 years in between the movies might be filled. Although perhaps that's the point -- it might be a stifling, decades-long blur of nothing. But judged on its own merits, this is a very good movie, hinging on a powerful and sympathetic performance by Goth. West sets up many highly atmospheric shots and striking images, including a vicious rainstorm, a flirtation with a scarecrow, a red dress, a dance number, a gothic dinner table tableau, and a shocker of a tracking shot.

An antique adults-only film and "X" images and references link Pearl to Goth's doppelganger Maxine from the first movie. There are also references to the Spanish flu pandemic of the time and to people having to wear masks. But the real key to Pearl is Goth's modulated performance, which effectively shows the character's wants and needs and the emotional cracks that form like fault lines when things twist or go awry. The movie's tour-de-force is a lengthy monologue -- with Goth emoting in long, unbroken takes -- unloading her innermost thoughts and feelings to Mitzy. The words tumble out like boulders in an avalanche. Her transformation into a psychotic killer is no accident, and it doesn't happen overnight. It's the product of her environment, as well as her gender and the time period. To some, those might have been the "good old days," but to women like Pearl, they were a trap.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Pearl 's violence . How did it make you feel? Was it exciting? Shocking? What did the movie show or not show to achieve this effect? Why is that important?

How is sex depicted? What values are imparted?

Is the movie scary or just gory? What's the difference? What's the appeal of horror movies ?

What does the movie have to say about the roles of women in history? What options did a woman have in 1918? How have things changed? How have they remained the same?

How does the movie compare to its predecessor? How do the two movies complement each other?

Movie Details

In theaters : November 15, 2022
On DVD or streaming : November 29, 2022
Cast : Mia Goth , Tandi Wright , David Corenswet
Director : Ti West
Inclusion Information : Female actors, Latino actors, Female writers, Latino writers
Studio : A24
Genre : Horror
Run time : 102 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : some strong violence, gore, strong sexual content and graphic nudity
Last updated : August 14, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Pearl review: Mia Goth melts down as a serial killer in the making

A prequel to Ti West's X, Pearl unfolds in a lurid psychological zone that's even scarier.

Senior Editor, Movies

As played by a fresh-faced, subtly unhinged Mia Goth , Pearl performs the tasks that might fall to any farm girl living in 1918 with a husband away fighting the Great War. She tends to her aging parents, sneaking off to the silent movies when she can. She feeds the livestock, chatting with Mr. Deuce, a duck. She tongue-kisses a scarecrow. She casually impales the duck with a pitchfork (sorry, Mr. Deuce), feeding it to an alligator in the local pond. She fantasizes about her husband's body exploding on a mine.

Pearl, if you haven't guessed it, is special ("I'm special," she says to no one in particular), and here's where anyone hoping to avoid spoilers for this movie or Ti West's 1970s-set retro slasher X — to which Pearl is a prequel — will want to check out. In X , Goth pulled off a fun, uncredited double dip, performing as that film's Maxine, a lanky wannabe porn star, and also its decrepit Pearl, the elderly murderous owner of the property on which the crew shoots Maxine's debut, The Farmer's Daughters .

But though it shares a cinematic universe with X (and a similar Searchers -like opening shot), Pearl is the superior film, less beholden to West's occasionally hermetic sense of horror-movie homage , but vibrating with the gushy gestures of Sirk-by-way-of-John-Waters melodrama. The new film explodes with primary colors, sporting a scripted title card with the name of the movie in quotes; it also floats along on that rarest of things, a churning wall-to-wall orchestral score (the intentionally emotive work is by Tyler Bates and Tim Williams).

It's a register well suited to depicting a mind plunging into fury. The dialogue isn't overheated so much as charred: "Malevolence is festering within you," declares Pearl's severe German mother (Tandi Wright), their Carrie -ish dynamic boding well for fans of gory parent-daughter showdowns. Pearl is best viewed as its main character's movie-obsessed vision, everyone else in it mere supporting players to the swirl in her head. Meanwhile, a pig carcass gathers maggots on the front porch, a sight few visitors seem to process as the warning it is.

Co-scripting with her director, Goth is the standout, displaying a verbal vigor and earthiness she's been unable to tap so far (not even in movies like Nymphomaniac and A Cure for Wellness ). Her babyish cheeks and slightly spaced delivery have never been put to better ends, and Goth makes the most of a croaking, lengthy one-take monologue, during which a new horror monster is born. Pearl is the rare origin story where you see the breakdown happening in real time. Grade: A–

Pearl cements Mia Goth’s place as a true horror icon

The middle film in Ti West’s moviemaking horror trilogy is a colorful blast with one central problem

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by Rafael Motamayor

Mia Goth, wearing overalls and a blue work shirt, raises a pitchfork over her head in Ti West’s Pearl

Polygon has a team on the ground at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival, reporting on the horror, comedy, drama, and action movies meant to dominate the cinematic conversation as we head into awards season. This review was published in conjunction with the film’s TIFF premiere.

When horror writer-director Ti West premiered his gory period slasher X at SXSW in March 2022, it came with a surprise reveal: an end-credits trailer for a prequel, Pearl , which would fill in the backstory of X ’s ruthless main villain. For Pearl ’s North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, West pulled a similar trick, with a teaser and announcement for a third film, MaXXXine , as a sequel to X . Where X is an ode to 1970s-style raw, grainy independent horror movies, West says MaXXXine will be inspired by the ’80s VHS boom — which the tracking lines, color glitches, and synth score on the MaXXXine teaser certainly underline.

That leaves Pearl as the middle movie in a trilogy (so far, at least), and also as the series’ biggest outlier. With stronger visuals than X , a phenomenal and ambitious performance from Mia Goth, but also an emptier and more meandering plot, Pearl loses the fun parts of Ti West’s pastiche. At the same time, it still delivers plenty of thrills and killer moments. It’s both a vividly painted nightmare and a showcase for its star.

X is firmly set during the independent filmmaking boom of the 1970s, as an homage to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre , as seen through the eyes of the porn industry. Mia Goth is stellar, pulling double duty as both final girl Maxine and as Pearl, the killer who comes after her. X has plenty of laughs, gory kills, inventive editing, and even some poignant commentary on show business and moviemaking ambitions.

Mia Goth dances in a blue spotlight onstage in Ti West’s Pearl

Pearl turns back the clock to tell Pearl’s story starting in 1918, when she’s a bright-eyed young woman (still played by Mia Goth) with big dreams of making it in the movies. The problem is that she’s stuck in a world too small for her. Her husband, Howard, is away in Europe, fighting the war to end all wars. In the meantime, Pearl is living at her parents’ farm under the thumb of her repressive German immigrant mother (Tandi Wright) and is forced to take care of her wheelchair-bound father (Matthew Sunderland) during the height of the Spanish flu pandemic, where people out on the streets wear masks over their mouths and noses, avoid close contact or indoor spaces, and constantly talk about the pandemic. A cacophony of coughing can be heard anywhere Pearl goes. What a coincidence!

Pearl hates her limited life under her mother’s eyes and judgment, and the only escapism she finds is at the movies. She dreams of being a dancer on the big screen, in front of big, adoring crowds. In the meantime, she dances to her animals, who she names after her favorite movie stars. She also occasionally kills one of them to feed the alligator that lives in the nearby pond. When she meets the self-serving projectionist (David Corenswet) at her local movie house, he sells her on big dreams of going to Europe and working as a dancer. He also grooms her, showing her a stag movie — the kind that paved the way for the indie porno shoot in X . Suddenly, Pearl sees a way out, and she’s willing to do anything to achieve it.

The primary reason to see Pearl is Mia Goth’s mesmerizing, tour-de-force performance. She infuses the role with enough innocence and wishfulness to make viewers root for her, even if they already know about her future crimes and are appalled by her choices in the present. While the look of the film may be inspired by Technicolor wonders like The Wizard of Oz , Goth’s performance is straight out of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho , kind and charming one minute, terrifying and deranged the next.

Where X was heavily inspired by the cheap, DIY aesthetic of early indie slashers, Pearl is aimed at replicating colorful visions in the vein of Mary Poppins . Cinematographer Eliot Rockett imbues the film with bright, vivid colors, a soft palette, and a dreamlike quality, while Tyler Bates and Tim Williams’ score gives the film a rousing symphonic sound that makes Pearl’s journey feel as grand as Maria’s in The Sound of Music . Pearl is pure pastiche in style, but it works wonderfully, and it resonates as something that expresses West’s reverence, rather than as a parody or simple imitation.

Mia Goth climbs up onto the perch of a creepy-looking scarecrow to give it a kiss in Ti West’s Pearl

The problem is that the pastiche doesn’t feel as purposeful as it did in X . The very specific 1918 setting doesn’t seem to be there for any other reason than to include a COVID allegory. It isn’t about specific movie references, which don’t reflect the moviemaking of the 1910s, and it doesn’t comment on conservatism or censorship in film, as the setting comes decades before the Hays Code turned Hollywood into a prisoner of moral conservatism.

The script, co-written by West and Goth, doesn’t do much to deepen Pearl’s character — and why would it? She’s the thinnest excuse for a character in X , an ageist villain who murders young, attractive, sexually active people out of petty jealousy and spite, mostly to get across a wry sense of irony over the idea that old people still want to feel loved and desired. With Pearl , West and Goth had an opportunity to explore the environment that created Pearl’s sexual and killer drive, but they mostly leave it to viewers’ imaginations. Like X before it, Pearl presents its central character as little more than a stock slasher-movie psycho with selfish ambitions, no moral compass, and an appetite for blood.

Pearl is a showcase for Mia Goth as a horror star: The climax centers on a monologue where West holds the camera on her face for more than five minutes as she reveals what drives her. West paints a pretty picture in the film, building up gorgeous Technicolor nightmares, aided by painted backgrounds and bright colors. But the pieces don’t add up into anything more than a shiny surface. Pearl goes to show that just because you can shoot a movie in secret doesn’t mean you have to.

Pearl debuts in theaters on Sept. 16.

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‘Pearl’ Review: Ti West and Mia Goth’s Unholy Prequel Doesn’t Kill

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Two for the price of one? Talk about indie ingenuity. But West went even further, not just casting a remarkable Goth in two roles, but two entire films. Unfortunately, one is far better than the other, and as West and Goth attempt to reverse-engineer a psycho killer’s bloody backstory, they diminish both “X” and “ Pearl ” in the process.

Soon after the film’s SXSW premiere , West and Goth revealed that, while making “X” in New Zealand during the early days of COVID-19 quarantine, they had also made a prequel to “X” that focused on the origin story of Goth’s older character, Pearl. If “X” is West’s love letter to ’70s-era exploitation films and indie porn, “Pearl” is an unholy ode to Technicolor fairy tales and the corrosive power of Hollywood, even in its earliest incarnation. Set in 1918 — toward the end of World War I and smack in the middle of the Spanish flu epidemic that infected one-third of the global population — “Pearl” attempts to fill in the blanks of Pearl’s backstory, a compelling enough idea that’s soon at the mercy of a rickety screenplay that’s both beholden to “X” and determined to be its own thing.

Before young Pearl can finish swanning about her bedroom in a lovely gown, the lights come crashing down (literally and metaphorically), and we’re suddenly thrust into the reality of her being: she’s stuck on a hardscrabble farm, her husband is serving his country somewhere hellish, and her only company is her stern German mother (Tandi Wright) and an infirm father (Matthew Sunderland). As we learned in “X,” young Pearl dreamed of stardom — a major movie buff, she was convinced she was destined for the limelight, determined to somehow break into Hollywood by way of her dancing, which we’re never entirely sure is very good or not — but “Pearl” makes plain just how out of reach that dream really is.

But what about the stars and story of “Pearl”? If the film’s first act is beholden to reminding its audience what they loved about “X,” its final act zooms too far out to remind anyone why they loved the first film and why they might love this second one. West has indicated that he is already hard at work on a third entry in the series, one that would be inspired by a different filmmaking era and likely sew up the many loose ends left dangling from “Pearl,” and he’s got his work cut out for him. It’s a classic prequel problem, as West attempts to balance the old stuff with the new, and comes up short on both ends.

At least there is the film’s second act, which marries the dueling spirits of the rest of the feature, finding something giddily dark and dirty in the process. Pearl loves nothing more than going to the pictures, and when a handsome projectionist (David Corenswet) catches her eye and invites her back to the movie house whenever she wishes, it sets into motion many events and emotions that will forever change her. We learn little about The Projectionist — hell, not even his name, he’s simply listed by his profession in the film’s credits — beyond his affection for dirty movies and the pride he feels in being a so-called “bohemian.” He’ll make an excellent mark.

But while she is doubtless an extraordinary performer, her talent often goes unchecked in the film. For every scene of her flipping out and burning through the screen, there’s a fussy, over the top corollary that follows on its heels. Nothing is as impressive as Pearl’s heart-stopping reaction to a pivotal dance audition, a raw and unfiltered sequence of truly bonkers proportions, but soon enough, West and Goth get bogged down in a laborious one-take sequence that mostly amounts to “Goth goes nuts, and then goes nuts again and again and again.”

It’s an impressive feat of filmmaking, but one that reveals nothing new, a major misstep for a film seemingly dedicated to doing just that. What’s the point of a prequel? We already know everything we need to about Pearl, but somehow, it feels less satisfying than we last left her, broken and bloody and crushed, but at least wholly original.

“Pearl” premiered at the 2022 Venice Film Festival. A24 will release the film in theaters on Friday, September 16.

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‘pearl’ review: ti west and mia goth’s ‘x’ prequel delivers more technicolor camp than horror.

The indie exploitation veteran and his starry-eyed leading lady trace the murderous mayhem of broken dreams on a Texas farm in the lush style of a midcentury melodrama in A24’s Venice premiere.

By David Rooney

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Reviewed at Wilshire Screening Room, Aug. 22, 2022. MPA Rating: R. In Venice Film Festival (Out of Competition). Running time: 102 MIN.

Production: An A24 Films release and presentation of a Little Lamb, Bron Creative production, in association with Mad Solar. Producers: Kevin Turen, Harrison Kreiss. Executive producers: Mia Goth, Peter Phok, Sam Levinson, Ashley Levinson, Scott Mescudi, Dennis Cummings, Karina Manashil.
Crew: Director: Ti West. Screenplay: Ti West & Mia Goth. Camera: Eliot Rockett. Editor: Ti West. Music: Tyler Bates, Tim Williams.
With: Mia Goth, David Corenswet, Tandi Wright, Matthew Sunderland, Emma Jenkins-Purro.

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Pearl review: a star is born (and is very, very bloody)

Pearl is a candy-coated piece of rotten fruit. The film, which is director Ti West’s prequel to this year’s X , trades in the desaturated look and 1970s seediness of its parent film for a lurid, Douglas Sirk-inspired aesthetic that seems, at first, to exist incongruently with its story of intense violence and horror. But much like its titular protagonist, whose youthful beauty and Southern lilt masks the monster within, there’s a poison lurking beneath Pearl ’s vibrant colors and seemingly untarnished Depression-era America setting.

Set around 60 years before X , West’s new prequel does away with the por nstars, abandoned farms, and eerie old folks that made its predecessor’s horror influences clear and replaces them with poor farmers, charming film projectionists, and young women with big dreams. Despite those differences, Pearl still feels like a natural follow-up to X . The latter film, with its use of split screens and well-placed needle drops, offered a surprisingly dark rumination on the horror of old age. Pearl , meanwhile, explores the loss of innocence and, in specific, the often terrifying truths that remain after one’s dreams have been unceremoniously ripped away from them.

At the center of both films is the lonely, impulsive serial killer that Mia Goth has now played at both the start and end of her life. In X , Goth’s dueling performances as Pearl and Maxine shione amid an array of memorable supporting turns from the film’s other stars. Pearl , conversely, puts Goth at the front and center of its story. In doing so, the film offers its star the chance to give one of the best and most vulnerable performances of the year so far.

Pearl begins in 1918, a year when many American men are still fighting the war overseas while those who are stateside have been left to grapple with the horror of the Spanish Flu. It’s a time that is capable of making anyone go a little mad, which is why it’s the worst — or perfect, depending on how you view it — environment for a young Pearl (Goth) to grow up in. When the film begins, Pearl is still living under the same suffocating roof as her domineering mother, Ruth (Tandi Wright), who makes her routinely bathe and feed her crippled father (Matthew Sunderland), all while Pearl is left to pray nightly for her husband, Howard (Alistair Sewell), to return home safely from the war.

Her poor relationship with her mother, combined with her own crushing loneliness, has made Pearl want nothing more than to get far, far away from her family’s farm. While she’s been able to stave off the suffocating mood of her life by routinely escaping into her own fantasies, a sudden act of cheerful, nonchalant violence in the film’s opening minutes makes it clear that Goth’s future serial killer is already on the brink of total collapse by the time Pearl catches up with her. As a result, the film’s script, which West and Goth co-wrote together, doesn’t take on the same slasher movie structure as X .

Instead, Pearl frequently feels like a kind of twisted coming-of-age story. In fact, like all the great heroes in all the great coming-of-age stories, the journey Pearl goes on throughout the film is one of self-acceptance. Over the course of Pearl ‘s 102-minute runtime, she’s forced to let her defenses down and learn how to be vulnerable in front of others. The only problem is that the real Pearl, the one she hides beneath a smile that feels alternately mischievous and menacing, has a habit of scaring those around her — and for good reason.

Pearl’s descent into full-blown madness is juxtaposed quite effectively against the film’s bright Technicolor look. The resulting effect is one that makes Pearl seem, at times, like a horror film directed by French filmmaker Jacques Demy. The film’s sets are covered in bright pastel colors (an alleyway drainpipe is noticeably painted pink in one memorable scene) in a way that even calls to mind a film like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg , which still looks as if it had been designed to look as sweet and delectable as possible. That said, the film that Pearl has the most in common with is not The Young Girls of Rochefort or X , but Blue Velvet .

Like that 1986 David Lynch-directed classic, Pearl is interested in exploring the rot that lies beneath the surface of so many American archetypes. Pearl’s desperate desire to escape her hometown notably,places her in the same emotional space as practically every cinematic high schooler or Disney princess. But unlike so many of cinema’s other wanderlust-driven young protagonists, Pearl does not shine the longer she is left out in the sun. Instead, she sours, and so do her dreams, which start out innocently enough before growing increasingly violent and disturbing. The film, in turn, gradually replaces its pristinely painted red barns, golden scarecrows, and other pieces of familiar Americana iconography with recurring images of rotting hogs and half-burnt corpses.

Eventually, no matter how hard she tries to suppress it, there’s nowhere for Pearl’s growing instability to go other than to the surface. Once it does, Pearl begins to indulge more in the kind of blood-soaked horror and brutality that X fans may have been expecting all along. However, as impactful as much of the violence is in Pearl ’s final third, it’s Goth’s red-faced, tear-streaked performance that ultimately takes center stage.

After opening with a delightfully macabre prologue, Pearl takes its time getting to the kind of violence and horror its story inherently promises. The film is a slow burn in a way that X very much wasn’t, which makes it far less superficially fun and rewatchable than West’s previous horror effort. Its second act, and especially the pace at which Pearl’s relationship with her mother develops, also drags in certain moments, which occasionally dulls the film’s overwhelming sense of unease.

But every time it seems like Pearl might get lost in the weeds of its own heightened vision of the past, Goth steps up and brings everything back into focus. The actress outdoes her work in X here, delivering a performance as Pearl ’s lead that elicits both pity and fear, often at the same time. Her performance is so central to Pearl , in fact, that the film essentially climaxes with a long monologue that plays out almost entirely in one unbroken close-up of Goth’s mascara-smudged face. The scene might be the best of Goth’s career so far, and it’s followed by an instance of cold-blooded brutality that might be the most technically impressive sequence West has ever pulled off (you’ll know it when you see it).

From there, Pearl achieves a kind of operatic quality that manages to mostly justify the prolonged build-up. Whether or not the film’s climax makes it as effective as that of X will, however, likely vary depending on the tastes of its viewers. X made a lasting impression because of how it pulled its tropes from the wells of various horror classics only to twist them in ways that were often surprising and darkly funny. Pearl , on the other hand, frequently draws inspiration from movies and stories that are, at most, only tangentially related to the horror genre.

The resulting film is a sun-soaked and vibrant slice of technicolor horror that’s both more technically impressive and subtler than X . The film presents its horrors more nakedly than X does, but it traffics in a sense of unease that is far less visceral than the straightforward, slasher-driven violence of its predecessor. Neither approach is more valid than the other, but it’s a testament to West’s control of his craft that Pearl manages to cast the spell that it does, one that makes it impossible to look away even when the film’s rotten truths are literally staring you in the face.

Pearl hits theaters on Friday, September 16.

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Pearl review: Mia Goth in a horror prequel that marks the birth of a new horror icon

Filmmaker ti west’s follow-up to ‘x’ is a masterclass in finding sympathy for the devil, article bookmarked.

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Ti West’s X , released last year, was a Seventies-set slasher about pornographers working on the sly in a remote Texan farmhouse. It was a pleasingly nasty work, if limited by its questionable reliance on treating the ageing body as a source of repulsion. Pearl is its (far superior) prequel, a film written in two weeks by director Ti West and his star Mia Goth , shot in total secrecy and scrawled in bloodied guts and impotent rage. It is a wholly different beast – a tragicomic portrait of a woman so unable to process the falsity of her daydreams that it drives her to murder and mayhem.

In X , Goth played a wannabe pornstar named Maxine and, under layers of prosthetics, an elderly woman named Pearl who craved and resented Maxine’s youth. This film, set in 1918, sees the young Pearl living on the same farmstead featured in X . She is the daughter of immigrant parents, who shield themselves away out of fear of the burgeoning influenza pandemic and the risks they face due to their German heritage. Pearl’s husband, Howard (Alistair Sewell), has been sent to the Western Front. Pearl’s father (Matthew Sunderland), it’s suggested, succumbed to the flu and was left paralysed. Her cruel mother (Tandi Wright) resents her new role as caregiver, and grows especially abusive when it comes to Pearl’s reveries.

The film’s feverishly sunny, three-strip Technicolor look pays homage to The Wizard of Oz (1939) – as does Pearl’s unusual courtship of a scarecrow and Tyler Bates and Tim Williams’s winningly romantic score. But these things almost seem to taunt Pearl. They suggest that Dorothy Gale was her fullest and most enlightened self among the silly fictions of Oz, and not the daily toils of Kansas.

Pearl’s trips into town, in order to fetch morphine for her father, lead her into the arms of the local cinema’s handsome projectionist (David Corenswet). She shares with him her dreams of becoming a famous dancer. Then she confesses that, “sometimes I worry I’m not the same as other people”. Pearl is not OK. Driven deep into hiding is the darkness that’s in her. The film’s kills – fewer and less baroque than X – each become sharp and taut expulsions of feeling. West’s camera looks up in awe as Pearl looms over the frame, her axe raised.

Pearl’s torment – empathetic, frightening, and ludicrous all at the same time – is believable largely because Goth single-handedly wills it to be. Her commitment to every choked cry for attention, to every glassy-eyed departure from reality, is unimpeachable. What’s even more impressive is how delicately the actor unpicks Pearl’s innocence, to show us a woman so open to the world and vulnerable to its cruelties that she’s become corrupted beyond hope. “I feel things very deeply,” she observes. At the theatre, Pearl watches as macabre newsreel footage cuts to lines of dolled-up chorus girls – you get the sense she’s lost the ability to tell the difference between the two, between the pure and the abject.

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That confusion reaches its apex in a final reel monologue, shot largely in a single take, in which all the shlockiness of Pearl’s descent into madness collapses into pure sorrow – a real rip-your-heart-out-and-slam-it-on-the-table moment for Goth. West’s film is, in short, a masterclass in finding sympathy for the devil. The credits close on Pearl as its hero grins manically, staring unblinkingly into the camera for several, unbroken minutes. It’s an impressive feat. But what we’re really looking at is the ascent, fully unmasked, of a brand new horror icon.

Dir: Ti West. Starring: Mia Goth, David Corenswet, Tandi Wright, Matthew Sunderland, Emma Jenkins-Purro, Alistair Sewell. 15, 102 minutes.

‘Pearl’ is in cinemas from 17 March

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Pearl Review

A prequel that should’ve been left on the shelf..

Pearl hits theaters on Sept. 16, 2022.

Set 60 years before X , Ti West’s Pearl — a.k.a. Pearl: The X-traordinary Origin Story — lacks the former’s focus and panache. It goes back to the early years of Mia Goth’s bloodthirsty wannabe starlet, a role that affords the English actress yet another challenge. In X, she played both rising porn star Maxine as well as the aged, decrepit Pearl in a tale of lust, gaze, jealousy, and fleeting youth, unfurling at the volatile nexus between sex and violence in the American psyche. Pearl, its prequel, steers clear of this territory despite also trading in similar filmic nostalgia; it very rarely knows what it wants to say, aesthetically or thematically. Its meandering plot, therefore, never fully coalesces, and never fully allows Goth to weave together the disparate elements of her character. It has a few frills, but not nearly enough thrills or chills to live up to its predecessor.

Filmed back-to-back with X during the COVID pandemic (both were shot in New Zealand in 2020, at a time when the virus hadn’t yet run rampant there), Pearl re-uses X’s Texan farmhouse setting, painting, and papering over its rotting walls with vibrant colors. The year is 1918. The first Great War is coming to a close, and the Spanish Flu is just beginning. Pearl’s husband, Howard, is still overseas, leaving her to care for her mute, infirm father (Matthew Sunderland) while tending to the family barn. The young milkmaid has dreams of dancing in the movies, despite the insistence of her overbearing German immigrant mother, Ruth (Tandi Wright), that she stay home and help with the farm. What begins as a straightforward tale of a small-town girl hoping to escape to Hollywood very quickly takes a turn as the seemingly naïve Pearl stabs her goose to death with a pitchfork in order to feed the alligator in the lake behind her house. Even though she talks to all her farm animals as if they were human beings (she dances for her goats and cows; they’re her audience), she has no trouble shedding blood, whether for amusement or mere convenience. This penchant for destruction eventually spreads to include the people standing in her way.

The outward dynamic between Pearl’s sheltered appearance and her desire to rebel through violence is the story’s core, made all the more intriguing by Goth’s performance as a wide-eyed country girl whose broad affectations harbor a dark streak. It’s a dichotomy that, in some ways, feels built into the film’s aesthetic fabric; it opens with the whir of a projector blended with the trilling of insects, drawing a direct line between Pearl’s surroundings and where she hopes to end up. The opening shot peers through barn doors (much as it did in X), pushing forward to capture the entire landscape and widen the frame — a promise on the horizon. However, where X spoke the more specific visual language of ’70s horror and porn, Pearl is more vague, nebulous, and anachronistic with its verbiage. Its colors pop like early Technicolor spectacles of the ’30s and ’40s; its sprawling title design is drawn from a similar time, as are its orchestral strings (by Tyler Bates and Tim Williams), even though it’s set in the silent era. This doesn’t feel like a mistake, per se — West opts for a similar anachronism when Pearl sneaks off to the movies and watches a dance number with a pre-recorded song — but in collapsing cinematic history this way, the film loses sight of what it hopes to say about images, sex, and stardom. It may as well have been set in any other decade.

In X, sex and violence were so closely entwined that, for the aged Pearl, they were essentially one and the same. The prequel seems to decouple this notion — Pearl befriends the theater’s smoldering projectionist (David Corenswet), who shows her an illicit porno he imported from Europe — but rather than exploring how these worlds eventually would meet in Pearl’s psyche, the movie’s approach to sexuality feels disconnected from everything else, not to mention sanded down. It features a particularly steamy send-up of The Wizard of Oz (another anachronism), but unlike in the more exacting X, this film’s use of feminine gaze and female libido feel like mere window dressing, rather than explorations of taboo — like they were preordained points Pearl needed to hit in order to feel like a proper prequel.

Goth, who ends up saddled with quite a shouty performance — it’s neither measured enough to be engrossing, nor campy enough to be fun — is at least afforded the chance to wrestle with Pearl’s violent impulses on occasion, creating a version of the character that’s as sympathetic as the one in X. She’s most enrapturing when she’s quiet, and when she ruminates on the way she’s seen. She is sometimes captured in long, static takes, placing this idea of self-image directly in the camera’s crosshairs; these shots become the film’s de-facto highlight, but in the process, little else truly lands when the camera either moves or focuses on anyone else. Wright is the one exception, as the domineering matriarch whose life didn’t turn out the way she’d hoped (Pearl’s biggest fear), and whose melancholic fury threatens to swallow not just Pearl, but the entire screen, when her daughter threatens to audition for a traveling dance troupe. But too often, the film opts for a straightforward presentation of its more discomforting and violent ideas. Like X, it builds tension on occasion, and holds it well during its fake-outs, but rarely pays it off in explosive fashion. This adds up after a while. Let the audience down enough times, and tension soon begins to feel like a false promise.

Even on its own merits, divorced from the previous film, Pearl is mostly a bloodless homage to too many different things — and yet, to not nearly enough things that feel thoughtfully considered. Notions of jealousy rear their head when Howard’s lively, attractive sister Misty (Emma Jenkins-Purro) enters the fray and auditions alongside Pearl, but rare are the moments when Pearl’s warped perspective either consumes the frame, or takes precedence over its calculated cinematic throwbacks.

What's the best horror prequel?

For all its faults, at least X felt fresh and energetic. Pearl, on the other hand, isn’t so much X-traordinary as it is X-hausting.

From its anachronistic homages to its tensionless filmmaking, Pearl — Ti West’s prequel to X — doesn’t have nearly as much to say as its predecessor. Mia Goth gives it her all as a villainess who dreams of stardom, but the film can’t decide what to do with her.

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With Pearl , A24 perfects its first horror franchise

Pearl gets everything right where X gets so much wrong.

Horror sequels are nothing out of the ordinary. If a new movie manages to scare up a profit at the box office, you can pretty much assume a sequel is already in the works. Prequels , however, are another story. Even before George Lucas poisoned the well, it was generally agreed that trying to tell a new story set before the original was more trouble than its worth.

So it may come as a surprise that Pearl , the surprise prequel to Ti West’s surprise horror hit X , not only matches but exceeds the original. Filmed back-to-back with X before that movie earned $14 million on a budget of $1M, Pearl proves that A24’s first horror franchise is Mia Goth, who pulls double duty once again in a movie that manages to out-perform the original in nearly every way.

In X , Goth played both the final girl (aspiring porn star Maxine Minx) and the resentfully decrepit killer Pearl. In Pearl , Goth returns as the killer in her youth, but her second role as co-screenwriter proves even more important. Perhaps Goth’s touch is the secret sauce X sorely needed.

Pearl gets everything right where X gets so much wrong. Where the latter clumsily connects porn’s golden age to the 1970s independent film movement, the former states its own thesis clearly: movies are a wonderful escape from dreary reality, but they aren’t an excuse to disassociate from it. But fair is fair. Combined, both films make an argument for Goth as one of 2022’s most vital actors, or if not that then certainly the gutsiest. Placed side-by-side, though, there’s no contest. Pearl is a gem.

It’s 1918 and Pearl is in her 20s (or possibly her late teens). She lives on the farm where the events of X take place with her flinty German mother Ruth (Tandi Wright) and invalid father (Matthew Sunderland). Pearl goes about her daily chores with a blithe spirit. Farm life, she declares repeatedly, isn’t for her. She’s a movie star. She just needs a big shot working in the pictures to discover her. The callous joke West tells about Pearl in these films is that she isn’t a star at all, just a delusional naif with dreams outsized to her talent.

Plot plays little part in Pearl : The film revolves around Pearl’s confrontations with Ruth, chitchats with her sister-in-law Mitzi (Emma Jenkins-Purro), uncomfortable bathtimes with her dad, and occasional unauthorized jaunts to the town theater, run by a fine as wine fella referred to only as “the projectionist” (David Corenswet). As Pearl waits for her husband Howard’s return home from Europe, her patience with her parents, Mitzy, and even the projectionist grows deliriously thin. All her pent-up frustration and ego has to vent at some point. Pearl asks us to guess when, and on whom.

Pearl trades X ’s sympathy for empathy.

Instead of a propulsive thriller, Pearl functions as a character study with psycho underpinnings. West cedes the stage exclusively to Goth instead of asking her to share it with his ensemble as she does in X . Of all the smart choices Pearl makes, centering the narrative on Goth is the smartest. She exudes greater presence here playing just the one character than she does playing two in X , which says much given that she’s still the best thing about it.

But with only Pearl to consider (and with the spotlight trained on her) Goth digs into the character with what reads as zeal upfront but on closer inspection looks an awful lot like affection. Goth slowly slices Pearl open over the movie’s course, leading up to a third-act monologue clocking in at several minutes’ worth of confessional vulnerability. It’s the punctuation mark to the questions Pearl asks about what drives her and (more importantly) what in the hell is wrong with her.

Pearl cuts a sympathetic figure in X , where she’s characterized as the product of life’s disappointments. She washes her failure’s bitter taste from her mouth by slaying the young and the beautiful at their sexual peak. Pearl trades X ’s sympathy for empathy. West and Goth keep intact the suggestion that fate dealt Pearl a bum hand, but the film paints a clear picture of what being American meant in the 1910s. Yes, Pearl had it hard, but so did everyone else. Her disappointments and hardships aren’t unique. Neither are her hopes and dreams. What sets Pearl apart from everyone else is that she won’t take “no” for an answer.

Pearl and X are both on-theme for director Ti West, but Pearl benefits immensely from streamlining.

Goth acts as much through expression as expectoration. She flashes million-watt smiles, gambols about sets like a carefree otter, oozes a humble charm that belies Pearl’s hunger for fame and murderous rage, and treats phlegm, drool, and tears as props. Any actor willing to push themselves so far on camera that they start dripping snot tendrils is one worth paying attention to. Goth puts her soul, plus a whole box of Kleenex, into fully realizing Pearl from pastoral ingenue to axe-swinging maniac. No other performance on screen this year comes close to hers in terms of self-assured abandon.

Pearl ’s credits linger on the image of her desperate, maniacal, fourth-wall-breaking grin, which she holds for the camera for so long one hopes she only needed a single take to nail it. Goth is so invested in Pearl’s well-roundedness, though, that if getting the take right meant straining her jaw, she probably would have, and her commitment echoes throughout the rest of the film’s production.

West grounds Pearl with that thought in mind. This is an artist with his eyes trained on the past. Movies like The Roost , The House of the Devil , and The Innkeepers each draw on specific horror niches (haunted house films, Satanic worship and supernatural films, and monster movies) as well as 1970s and 1980s aesthetics.

Pearl and X are both on-theme for West, then, but Pearl benefits immensely from streamlining. In X , West’s kitchen sink tendencies get the better of him. Instead of having an idea, he has all of them, which stirs up a discordance of theme, style, atmosphere, and character that sets the movie off-kilter. But Pearl lands right in the 1930s and stays there through the use of Technicolor visuals, wipe transitions, and iris shots. West’s facility with these techniques dovetails with Goth’s work for a shocking, foundational effect: the oldfangled sensibility evoked through Pearl ’s design adds oomph to its every act of violence, be it small (pitchforking a duck) or great (pitchforking a person). Strictly speaking, X is gorier. In Pearl gore is used sparingly, but it hits harder against West’s backdrop — and so does Goth’s gradual ascent to madness.

Pearl debuts in theaters on Friday, September 16.

Pearl Review

Audiences for Ti West ’s effective, gruesome retro-shocker X — in which porno filmmakers run into an aged, homicidal farmwife in 1979 — were doubly surprised by the end credits. First, there was the revelation that ‘final girl’ Maxine and pension-age mass murderess Pearl were both played (extraordinarily) by Mia Goth . Then, there was a trailer for a Pearl-centric prequel which West and Goth (who co-wrote Pearl ) put together before the first film was released. This might seem presumptuous or ill-advised — like making Joker , but with a newly minted character who hasn’t yet permeated pop culture. Several entries in the Texas Chainsaw franchise (to which X owes a huge, admitted debt) stumble by telling more than anyone cares to know about where Leatherface came from.

In the event, Pearl isn’t an exercise in filmmakers doing their own fan fiction but the ambitious, impressive centrepiece in what’s now revealed as a trilogy. The threads will be drawn together next year in MaXXXine , which picks up Maxine’s story in 1985. Ti West has always been in love with recreating bygone modes of cinema — 2009’s The House Of The Devil , his breakthrough picture, was a perfect pastiche of the 1970s TV horror movie, and In A Valley Of Violence (2016) is a suspense Western — while finding ways of connecting the pop culture of the past with the things that scare us today. Pearl is set during the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918, but the characters (who wear masks to venture into town) suffer from many of the woes of the modern lockdown era. Even isolated Pearl’s dream of becoming a movie star feels as close to a present-day aspiration to YouTube fame or influencer status as the eternal yearning of girls on farms to be spirited over the rainbow, as enshrined in classic Hollywood.

Just as X cobbled together elements from exploitation horror and sex films of the 1970s, Pearl references inside-the-mind-of-a-maniac horror movies.

West never lets the viewer forget that this is a new-old movie. The opening credits, over a freeze-frame of the smiling Pearl feeding a pitchfork-skewered goose to her alligator best friend, are in a swirly pink font. The almost-continuous orchestral score by Tyler Bates and Timothy Williams is a romantic counterpoint to the onscreen action. Pearl herself is constantly referring to the movies (she names her cows after film stars) and sneaking out against her grim mother’s (Tandi Wright) wishes, to waste money in the local picture palace. With her husband (Alistair Sewell) overseas — she imagines him waving cheerily as he comes home, stepping on a landmine in her yard and being blown to bloody little bits — Pearl is attracted to a ridiculously handsome projectionist (David Corenswet). In his secret cinema stash is a stag reel foreshadowing the Deep Throat-era smut of X , which will rekindle Pearl’s sexual fantasies and killer instincts.

Pearl dances with a scarecrow and filches its top hat for her dance costume, but West and Goth take another Oz image and present it as an expression of frustrated sexuality and seething, incipient mania. Just as X cobbled together elements from exploitation horror and sex films of the 1970s, Pearl references inside-the-mind-of-a-maniac horror movies. A cooked pig left on the porch, which Pearl’s starving but proud mother won’t eat because it’s a charitable gift from her son-in-law’s family, decays and crawls with maggots like the rabbit that parallels Catherine Deneuve ’s mental collapse in Repulsion . Pearl sometimes seems on her way to becoming Norman Bates’ mother, and a tableau of corpses around the dinner table evokes Psycho , The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and the slightly less mainstream down-home horror hit Deranged . The dilapidated farm of X is seen here 60 years earlier, with a fresh coat of paint, but that flesh-hungry ’gator already lurks in the lake on the property and Pearl is well on the way to becoming a magnificent monster.

In recent years, there’s been a tradition of female actors getting showcase roles in horror — Essie Davis in The Babadook , Toni Collette in Hereditary , Rebecca Hall in The Night House . Goth, whose range encompasses Lars von Trier ( Nymphomaniac ) and Jane Austen ( Emma. ), is an astonishing addition to this company. In a turning point, Pearl demands to know why the projectionist isn’t attracted to her anymore, and the grown-up gives a child’s response: “You’re scaring me.” Goth does a great deal more than scare us, with a showstopper soliloquy delivered to her absent husband, eloquent physical action in dance and murder scenes (she’s as limber a performer as the robot girl in M3GAN ) — and a final smile more frightening than any of the rictus grins in Smile , perhaps the equal of the smirk on Mrs Bates’ mummified skull.

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‘Pearl’ Review – Mia Goth Has That ‘X’ Factor in Ti West’s Gorgeous Technicolor Nightmare

Bloody Disgusting’s Pearl review is spoiler-free.

Writer/Director Ti West nestled his ode to independent, exploitation filmmaking into ‘70s set slasher X . For its prequel, West rewinds the clock much further to pay tribute to the Golden Age of Hollywood. Mia Goth reprises her role as the repressed killer Pearl, this time exploring a much different, younger side. Pearl makes for a vastly different viewing experience thanks to its drastic shifts in style, tone, and cinematic influences, but with enough connective tissue to enrich its predecessor.

Set in 1918, Pearl longs to get away from her family’s farm. Her husband is away at war. She lives with her strict German mother ( Tandi Wright ) and is forced to care for her sickly father ( Matthew Sunderland ). Pearl is a dreamer, though; she spends her time shirking responsibilities, sneaking off to the movies, or dancing around the barn and at home. After she bumps into the theater’s Projectionist ( David Corenswet ), her dreams go into overdrive. But something’s very wrong with Pearl. She’s volatile and has a tendency to inflict harm on others. Her killer instincts emerge whenever someone threatens to get in the way of her dreams.

West, who co-wrote Pearl with Goth, painstakingly injects plenty of connective tissue between films to further flesh out and reward revisits of X . There are the more apparent callbacks, like Pearl’s penchant for feeding alligators, and then plenty of subtle ones, like the inclusion of a wheelchair or her bicycle. “Oui Oui Marie” even makes a sly return. But if you expected the prequel to further flesh out the deranged yet loving relationship between Pearl and Howard, this is Pearl’s story.

More specifically, this is Goth’s movie. If X was a showcase for Goth’s talents as she pulled double duty, Pearl doubles down on her talents in a different way. This iteration of the character is a naïve dreamer coming to terms with who she is and the ugly parts she’s buried. This is a budding serial killer who unsettles others when she’s not trying to mask those terrifying parts of herself. It gives Goth much to work with, from girlish whimsy to unhinged shrieking fits. Goth most impresses in an insanely lengthy, confessional monologue that goes through a wide range of emotions.

West’s tribute to this bygone era of filmmaking yields a gorgeous technicolor nightmare. Vibrant skies and painted backdrops to elaborate dance numbers, all set to a sweeping score, contrast the more flashy and macabre horror moments. It’s Pearl’s dreams rotting inside out, made tangible in film. It heightens the drama and revels in the surreal; there’s a warped sense of humor to it all.

West and Goth play by their rules here, stylistically and narratively. West uses his cinematic influences to create something unique and audacious, and Goth cuts loose with an unrestrained performance. That it’s so different from X and its slasher framework means it’s much slower to come together. It’s less about the body count, though there are plenty of bloody, violent deaths, and more about a slow unraveling of a mind that was a bit broken from the start. That has the potential to polarize, but it’s a technical marvel and an absolutely wild ride all the same.

Pearl releases in theaters on September 16.

Horror journalist, RT Top Critic, and Critics Choice Association member. Co-Host of the Bloody Disgusting Podcast. Has appeared on PBS series' Monstrum, served on the SXSW Midnighter shorts jury, and moderated horror panels for WonderCon and SeriesFest.

“The Boys” Actor Claudia Doumit Joins ‘M3GAN’ Spinoff ‘SOULM8TE’

Claudia Doumit as Victoria Neuman in the Boys

The M3GAN Universe will also be expanding next year with a spinoff horror movie titled SOULM8TE , starring Lily Sullivan ( Evil Dead Rise, Monolith ). After popping heads as Victoria Neuman on Prime Video’s “ The Boys ,” Deadline reports that actor Claudia Doumit has joined the cast of the horror spinoff.

The spinoff is being billed as a ’90s-style erotic thriller with a “new technological twist,” and it’s coming to theaters on January 2, 2026 .

Doumit will star opposite previously announced leads Sullivan and David Rysdahl , but character details are currently under wraps.

SOULM8TE follows along as “a man (Rysdahl) acquires an Artificially Intelligent android (Sullivan) to help him cope with the recent loss of his deceased wife. In an attempt to create a truly sentient partner, the man inadvertently turns a harmless lovebot into a deadly soulmate.”

Kate Dolan ( You Are Not My Mother ) will direct. The filmmaker rewrote an original draft from Rafael Jordan ( Salvage Marines ), which was based on a story by James Wan, Ingrid Bisu and Jordan. It’s said to be far more risqué than its parent film.

“Fundamentally, I view this film as an exploration of relationships and loneliness,” Dolan said in a recent statement. “Despite technological advances, there are enduring human truths we cannot escape, and I am looking forward to delving into those depths.”

“ SOULM8TE is a thrilling and seductive addition to the M3GAN universe. We’re excited to partner with Kate to bring this story to life with her unique cinematic vision and point of view,” said James Wan, who produces through his company Atomic Monster.

M3GAN was a massive viral hit for Blumhouse back in 2022, the film scaring up $180 million at the worldwide box office. It’s no secret why Blumhouse is all-in on all things M3GAN .

Wan and Jason Blum will produce, with Michael Clear and Judson Scott of Wan’s Atomic Monster exec producing alongside Ingrid Bisu. Alayna Glasthal is the executive overseeing the project for Atomic Monster.

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Pearl ending explained: Pearl was going to be a star by any means necessary

By crystal george | aug 16, 2024.

PEARL. (L-R) Mia Goth - Credit: Christopher Moss

With the release of MaXXXine in theaters back in July, Ti West's X trilogy is now complete. The film series consists of X (2022), Pearl (2022) and MaXXXine (2024). MaXXXine isn't available yet to stream, and X was on Netflix earlier this year before it made its departure. Pearl is the only movie in the film series that you can stream at the moment, and luckily, it's now on our favorite streamer, Netflix .

Unlike X and MaXXXine , which are straight slashers, Pearl is a psychological horror film. We're taken back to 1918, where a young, aspiring actress named Pearl lives with her overbearing mother and ailing father on their isolated Texas farm. Pearl has dreams of being a movie star, but her controlling mother and responsibilities on the farm make it hard for her to pursue them. She refuses to give up, though, and it's her extreme tenacity to make it big that ultimately pushes her down a dark, murderous path.

But did Pearl achieve her dream of being a star in the end? Find out below as we share a breakdown of what happened at the end of Ti West's Pearl .

Major spoilers ahead from Pearl .

How does Pearl end?

After killing everyone she saw as a threat to her dreams and not getting the part in the dance troupe, Pearl descends into complete madness. She accepts that she will forever be trapped on the farm and never make a name for herself. The last person she kills is her sister-in-law Misty, whom she cuts up and then feeds to Theda, the alligator.

Then, she dresses up her badly decomposed mother and father's bodies and props them up at the dining table around a rotten feast. This is her attempt at making herself and the house presentable for her military husband's (Howard) return. Her mental state has deteriorated so badly that she doesn't even realize that what she's doing is wrong. Just as she's about to bring a pitcher of juice to the table, Howard walks through the door and stares in shock at what's going on.

Pearl expresses to him how happy she is that he's back at home, but all Howard can do is stare at her with an uneasy expression. Pearl then smiles creepily at him with her smile becoming increasingly creepy as the credits roll.

Who dies in Pearl?

Four characters die in this horror film , and they all die by the hands of Pearl. Below, we shared which characters are killed by Pearl and how.

The projectionist

After driving Pearl home so that she can prepare for her dance audition, the projectionist becomes suspicious of her after he notices her acting strangely. He also notices a rotting pig sitting on her doorstep, which makes him more suspicious. He's officially done with her after he asks her about her dog, and she responds by saying that she doesn't have one even though she told him previously that she did.

The projectionist then comes up with an excuse to leave her, but Pearl goes mad and chases after him with a pitchfork that she uses to stab him in the chest and mouth fatally. She then puts his dead body back in his car before pushing the car into the pond, where Theda eats his remains.

Pearl's father

After killing the projectionist, Pearl heads back into her house to prepare for her dance audition. But before she leaves, she kills her sick father by smothering him with a pillowcase.

Ruth, Pearl's mother

Ruth is the first person to get attacked by Pearl. After they get into a physical altercation during dinner, Pearl accidentally pushes Ruth into the fireplace, setting her on fire. Pearl tries to put the fire out by throwing water on her, but she ends up picking up a pot of boiling water. The hot water burns Ruth's body badly, but this doesn't stop Pearl from throwing her into the basement. Pearl returns later to push Ruth down the basement stairs and leaves her there to die.

After not getting the part in the dance troupe, a sad Pearl returns home. Misty shows up and tries to comfort her, which leads Pearl to confess to the murders she committed, among other bad deeds. After pressuring Misty to reveal that she got the part in the troupe, Pearl then tries to convince her not to tell anyone about the murders.

While it initially looks like Pearl is going to let Misty live, Pearl walks out of the house, picks up an axe, and then chases after her with it. She slashes Misty with the axe until she falls to the ground before delivering one final blow. As mentioned earlier, Pearl later cuts up Misty's body before feeding her remains to Theda.

What did you think about Pearl 's ending?

Next. 4 best new Netflix movies to watch (and 2 to skip) in August 2024. 4 best new Netflix movies to watch (and 2 to skip) in August 2024. dark

Pearl Review: An X-Traordinary Prequel

Mia Goth's performance is incredible
It looks amazing
It's darkly funny
The horror is wildly different from the previous film, but just as effective
It doesn't move at the same tight clip as "X"

Though he's primarily known as a horror filmmaker, Ti West has always displayed a certain chameleonic tendency even within his chosen genre. Whether he's working with '80s throwbacks ( "House of the Devil" ) or found footage ("The Sacrament") , West has always found a way to immerse himself and his cast and crew in the formalism of whatever he's working on, which means that each film is distinct from the one that came before, even when they're connected.

Which brings us to "Pearl," West's latest film and a prequel to his previous 2022 horror hit, "X." Announced in a surprise reveal following the SXSW premiere of "X," "Pearl" reunites West with the first film's star, Mia Goth, for a decades-earlier origin story that's both visually and tonally very different from its predecessor. And yet, perhaps the most striking thing about "Pearl" is that it manages to be so different while never losing touch with the world that inspired it. Vibrant, brutal, and driven by Goth's fierce lead performance, it's a haunting, blackly comic melodrama, a Disney Princess movie for axe murderers, that's just as unforgettable as the sleazy slasher vibes of "X."

A star is born

It's 1918, and Pearl (Goth, no longer under the heavy prosthetics she used to play the character as an old woman in "X") dreams of becoming a star. As World War I rages in Europe, taking her husband away from her, and a flu pandemic rages at home, she does chores on the family farm while performing dances for the animals in the barn, taking every opportunity to go into town and see a movie. More than anything, Pearl wants to go from watching movies to starring in them, but the world of the farm feels far away from the silver screen, with her ailing father (Matthew Sunderland) and her domineering mother (Tandi Wright) holding her back.

When she sees what feels like her big break looming in the form of a local audition for dancers, Pearl hopes to finally make a clean break from the farm and the dull lives of her parents. But the journey from farmgirl to silver screen star isn't easy, especially as Pearl realizes something is lurking in her, a darkness that she can't explain but which threatens to consume everything around her.

Right away, "X" fans will notice various hallmarks of that film's world, from the farmhouse at the center of the story to the way West chooses to frame certain shots, but "Pearl" does not coast by on references like so many prequels before it. We recognize that this is the same universe, the same plot of land, the same house where things went horribly wrong for a group of teenagers, but it's both a different time and a different Pearl. West and Goth (who co-wrote the screenplay with the director) embrace the 1918-ness of it all just as they embraced the late 1970s aesthetics of "X." That means silent movies flicker around Pearl's world, the Spanish flu looms as a constant threat, and the distant brutality of war affects everyone's daily life. It also means that West and Goth get to play with an entirely different tone and an entirely different kind of horror.

The origin of X

Almost immediately, with its sweeping score and bright, dramatic colors, "Pearl" sweeps you into a world that feels more like the Golden Age of Hollywood than a modern slasher, or even a throwback slasher with a modern edge. West and Goth are intimately concerned with Pearl's inherent darkness, her sometimes ruthless nature, and the urges that she constantly resists right up until she doesn't. The result is a film that's more of an emotional horror than a physical one (though the physical horror does come and doesn't hold back). Goth's fearless central performance pushes the emotional resonance of the film into overdrive, even as West's visual style calls to mind everything from "The Wizard of Oz" to Disney films to old melodramas about farm girls with big dreams. Goth never resists this stylized view of Pearl's world, and yet her performance is remarkably subtle given some of the more over-the-top elements of the storytelling. She's completely invested in the inner reality of the character, in the rich fantasy world that Pearl retreats into when the real world is too much for her, and she explores it with big, expressive eyes, a wide smile, and savagery that flips on and off like a light switch. It's a remarkable performance, and West knows exactly how to complement it with his direction.

In some ways, much like "X," "Pearl" is a movie about movies, or rather a movie about a movie-obsessed young woman who firmly believes herself to be the leading lady of her own life. That life, though pushes back against Pearl's dreamy notions, and it's in that pushback that the terror comes. The horror of "Pearl" is perhaps a bit spacier and more esoteric than the more straightforward slasher fun of "X," but it's no less effective, and West is no less invested in making it work. He leans hard into the primary colored daylight of the film and the concreteness of Pearl's dreary life so that he can then take her off into her dreamscapes with a clear eye toward contrasting — and finally blending — the two emotional states. It's just as visually dynamic as the previous film but in an entirely different way, reconfirming West's shapeshifting prowess as one of our finest genre filmmakers.

"Pearl” will not scratch the same itch among horror fans that "X" did, but it succeeds in other ways, in part by revealing things we didn't even know we wanted to see. It's a remarkably fully realized, deeply entertaining piece of horror filmmaking, and it just might make you fall a little bit in love with the nasty piece of work at the center of the story.

"Pearl" hits theaters on Friday, September 16.

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One of the best horror movies in recent years is now on netflix (& there’s already 2 sequels).

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15 Easter Eggs & References In Ti West's Pearl

Move over stranger things, the return of this tv+ sci-fi show is what i'm most excited for, new prime video series is the perfect fallout follow-up after video game adaptation success.

Mia Goth stars in the horror movie Pearl, now streaming on Netflix with two sequels available.
Pearl, the prequel to the X trilogy, was filmed during the COVID shutdown and released just months after X.
Ti West's X trilogy concluded with MaXXXine, which released in July 2024.

Pearl , a horror highlight released in 2022, is officially streaming on Netflix, and there are already two sequels available that continue the story. Mia Goth re-teamed with director Ti West after they worked together on X , the movie that launched the horror trilogy. The prequel movie Pearl actually came about while filming X and was notably filmed directly after during the COVID shutdown. Relying on X 's filming locations , the cast and crew were able to knock out the prequel and release it just seven months after X .

While Mia Goth headlined Pearl 's cast, David Corenswet also played a critical role as the local theater projectionist in the movie. Corenswet, of course, is set to star as Clark Kent in James Gunn's upcoming Superman . Meanwhile, Goth continues to make a name for herself in the horror genre. In addition to being the lead for West's X trilogy , she appeared in notable horror movies like Suspiria and Infinity Pool, with an upcoming role in Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein .

Ti West's horror movie for A24, Pearl, is packed with references and Easter Eggs to X and other classic films like Psycho and The Wizard of Oz.

Pearl Is Now Streaming On Netflix: What The Movie Is About

Pearl is a villain origin story.

Now available to Netflix subscribers starting on July 16th, 2024, Pearl follows a young woman in 1918 living on a Texas farm with her parents. With a father in poor health and an overbearing mother, Pearl is continuously forced to put her dreams of being a movie star on hold . However, when opportunities to achieve her dreams arise, Pearl turns violent when those hopes are dashed. Goth plays the titular role, embodying the aspiring star before becoming the antagonist in X .

X and Pearl were both filmed in New Zealand despite the movies being set in Texas.

Pearl Is The 2nd Movie In Ti West's Trilogy (But It's A Prequel)

Ti west's trilogy came to an end in 2024.

The production of Pearl was a complete surprise, with Ti West developing the idea once filming X was already underway. Though Pearl is the second movie in West's X trilogy, it's the first movie in terms of continuity. Pearl and her husband are key figures during X , which takes place at the same family farm, but this time, a film crew shooting a porno is staying on the property in the '70s. Goth plays the role of Pearl and Maxine Minx alongside X 's cast, which includes Jenna Ortega, Brittany Snow, and Scott Mescudi.

X was received very well by audiences and critics, garnering a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes . Pearl came in just a tad lower at 92%, but that's still impressive considering how fast the film was made during the pandemic. Due to the critical success of the first two movies, West decided to bring Goth back for a third X movie , developing MaXXXine . The third movie, which released in July 2024, jumped to the early '80s and focused on Maxine's journey as an actress in Hollywood after surviving the events of X .

Where To Stream X & MaXXXine

All movies are available to rent & purchase.

Mia Goth as Maxine in X (2022) and MaXXXine (2024)

At the time of writing, Pearl is the only movie within the X trilogy that is available to streaming subscribers . That said, there are still options for streaming X and MaXXXine . X can be rented on Apple TV and Amazon for $3.99 with purchase options of $19.99. MaXXXine recently came to VOD , so there aren't cheaper rental options outside of the $19.99 price on Apple and Amazon. The new release can also be purchased for $24.99.

Due to A24's current streaming deal, MaXXXine will eventually come to Max when it's more widely available. Though there hasn't been an announcement made regarding MaXXXine 's release on Max, past A24 movies have been added to the streamer four to five months after leaving theaters. So it's very possible the follow-up to Pearl and X will arrive on streaming by the end of the year.

Source: Rotten Tomatoes

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Pearl’ on Netflix, the ‘X’ Prequel Featuring an All-Time Performance by Mia Goth

Where to stream:, ‘pearl’ ending explained: why does howard stay with pearl, stream it or skip it: ‘maxxxine’ on vod, the slashy, sleazy ’80s-set finale to mia goth and ti west’s ‘x’ trilogy, new movies on streaming: ‘a quiet place: day one,’ ‘maxxxine’ + more, ‘maxxxine’ comes to digital, but when will ‘maxxxine’ be streaming on max.

The year of no lord 2022 introduced us to a new vital filmmaking team in writer/director Ti West and actress Mia Goth , who gave us the year’s two best horror movies in X and its follow-up/prequel, Pearl (now streaming on Netflix). Quick recap: X was the heartwarming story of a film crew shooting a near-zero-budget porno on a very incredibly Texas Chain Saw Massacre -inspired farm, and meeting a grotesque fate courtesy the old hayseed couple living there; Goth played both the porno star AND the homicidal old lady doing the ol’ hack ‘n’ slash. As soon as X earned acclaim for being weird and funny and fabulously freaky, West revealed that they’d shot it back-to-back with Pearl , which debuted a few months later, co-written by and starring Goth again as the homicidal old lady, except it’s her origin, 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 in the literal sense, since Pearl is a slasher film at heart, and I also mean it in the cliched figurative sense – this is her star turn, and for my nickel, she was royally screwed out of an Oscar nomination. And THEN, guess what, this is actually a trilogy, with the ’80s porno slasher MaXXXine now in our lives — but first, let’s get into the nitty gritty of Pearl , and Goth’s masterful performance.

PEARL : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Pearl (Goth) is all gussied up in her Sunday best. Posing in the mirror. All smiles and ribbons in her hair. The strings on the score are just soaring and the opening titles play in a jaunty cursive font – but all is not flowers and puppies for Pearl. Her mother Ruth (Tandi Wright) is a dolorous woman who has no tolerance for merriment. Happiness is something out of this woman’s reach. In a harsh German accent, she chastises Pearl to get out of those old clothes and get her tuckus out to the barn and do her chores. Pearl has no one to truly 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 stuck on this farm. Stuck . All Pearl has is a dream of being famous like the dancers in the pictures she sneaks off to town to see when her mother isn’t hectoring her about the constancy of misery. It’s 1918.

The next day Ruth sends Pearl to town for Pa’s medicine, and off she bicycles. She picks up the bottle of morphine then settles into a seat at the cinema, takes a big swig (well then!) and watches the lady dancers on the big screen. The film is something something Follies , because every third movie from the era had the word Follies in it. She meets the projectionist (David Corenswet, who would later go on to be cast as the next Superman), a nice fella who offers her a cigarette and a kind word and tells her to stop by again sometime (for what, exactly? Hmm). On the way home, she encounters a scarecrow crucified in a cornfield. Now, I’ll stop summarizing for a moment to say that to this point, the only inkling we had that Pearl isn’t quite right in the head is an earlier scene in which she picked up her trusty pitchfork and rather nonchalantly and brutally slaughtered her goose and walked it out to the end of the dock to feed to her “pet” gator, Theda. She even comes when she’s called, this loyal very large reptile. What happens with the scarecrow isn’t for me to divulge, but I will say Pearl goes home wearing his hat, which is the very least of the encounter, and further establishes our protagonist as an individual existing somewhere on the spectrum between “eccentric” and “demoniac.”

Of course, lest we forget, X showed us that Pearl’s a murderous wackadoo even at age 80-something, but not all murderous wackadoos were always murderous wackadoos. Well, maybe Pearl always has been; it’s hard to tell. Not every psychologically oppressed farm girl pals around with a gator named after the silent star of Cleopatra (had to Google it, full disclosure), or puts her hand on her infirm father’s windpipe and gives it a test squeeze, or does whatever the living hell was going on in the scarecrow scene. But then Mama Ruth says she knows Pearl went to the pictures because her change from the pharmacist was eight cents short, and Pearl lies and says she bought some candy, but that’s still a wasteful expenditure per Ruth, so she sends her grown-adult-ass daughter to bed without her supper. Meanwhile, Pearl pins all her hopes of fame and adoration on a local audition for a troupe of traveling dancing girls. How will she ever free herself from matriarchal tyranny in order to even get out the door to the audition? Full-blown psychopathy wouldn’t be your first option, but hey, to each their own, I guess.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Dorothy never did that to the Scarecrow.

Performance Worth Watching: How old is Pearl, exactly? At times, she seems girlish, at others, aggressively womanly . She’s innocent, but no, she’s actually malevolent. Wide-eyed, but corrupt. All of this occurs at the same time, often in a single Goth expression. Her characterization here is exquisite – courageous and funny, empathetic at the same time it’s impressively depraved.

Memorable Dialogue: Pearl experiences a moment of self-awareness: “I don’t feel… well .”

Sex and Skin: A few glimpses at what real-life historians consider might be the first-ever real-life porn film, A Free Ride .

Our Take: Shifting away from the scuzzy aesthetic of X , West endows Pearl with the upbeat tones and vibrant primary colors of Technicolor Hollywood, an overt and borderline-crass use of irony in the service of a gory, violent story about inexplicable evil. It’s a juxtaposition of old-timey melodrama and new-timey arthouse shock that, without its inspired central performance, could be overwrought, overly calculated pastiche. But Goth is the glue holding it together, elevating the film from let’s-destroy-something-beautiful fodder to a richly layered character drama. Think Joaquin Phoenix’s Oscar-winning antiheroic turn in Joker , but subtler and more dynamic in tone – and funnier. Much funnier, and therefore much more daring. Goth finds the sweetest of sweet spots between tragic and comic, empathetic and repulsive, bringing us along for the ride in her psycho-tornado, and when we land we’re dizzy and exhilarated, and definitely not in Kansas anymore.

Pearl is structured as a small handful of scenes of gruesome slaughter connected by sinewy stretches of melodrama. In the parlance of horror films, the kills are nasty and sometimes even gleeful, and they count . The goose bit teases, the scarecrow bit sets the hook, and at about the halfway point, the entire endeavor piggybacks on Goth. Instead of lining up the victims and letting Pearl get her Lizzy Borden on, Goth and West ruminate in the age-old debate of nature vs. nurture; is her illness created by her joyless circumstances, or is it a nigh-supernatural force that encourages suffering so it may feed upon it? The idea emerges in an inevitable mother-daughter dinnertime confrontation, which swells into eye-opening hysteria as horror and melodrama clasp hands and dance to the bewildering dirge.

And that’s merely Goth getting started. She’s the subject of many searing closeups in which Pearl’s inner torment silent-screams through unblinking eyes and a deranged rictus – the audition sequence, a masterfully executed confessional monologue and the final shot, which holds and holds and holds until we can bear it no more. It’s an all-timer of a horror performance by Goth, who upsets and unsettles like few before her.

Our Call: STREAM IT, then fire up X and MaXXXine .

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Stream It Or Skip It

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Official Discussion - Pearl [SPOILERS]

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The story of how Pearl became the vicious killer seen in "X".

Ti West, Mia Goth

David Corenswet as The Projectionist

Mia Goth as Pearl

Emma Jenkins-Purro as Mitsy

Alistair Sewell as Howard

Matthew Sunderland as Pearl's Father

Tandi Wright as Ruth

-- Rotten Tomatoes: 84

Metacritic: 72

VOD: Theaters

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A Controversial 23-Year-Old World War II Film Is Coming to Tubi in September

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The 2001 war drama Pearl Harbor is set to make its way to Tubi this September, offering audiences another chance to revisit one of the most polarizing films of its time.

Directed by Michael Bay and produced by Bay alongside Jerry Bruckheimer, Pearl Harbor is a romantic war drama that blends historical events with a fictionalized love story, set against the backdrop of the infamous Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The film, which stars Ben Affleck, Kate Beckinsale, and Josh Hartnett, will be available for streaming on Tubi starting September 1 .

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Pearl Harbor tells the story of childhood friends Rafe McCawley (Ben Affleck) and Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett), both of whom become Army Air Corps pilots. Their friendship is tested when Rafe falls in love with a Navy nurse, Evelyn Johnson (Kate Beckinsale), only for Danny and Evelyn to become involved after Rafe is presumed dead in combat. The love triangle plays out as the Japanese forces prepare and ultimately execute the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, thrusting the United States into World War II. The film also covers the subsequent Doolittle Raid, America's first retaliatory air strike against Japan.

Upon its release, Pearl Harbor was a commercial success, grossing $59 million during its opening weekend and ultimately earning $449.2 million worldwide, making it the sixth-highest-grossing film of 2001. Despite its financial success, the film was met with largely negative reviews from critics. Many criticized the film's screenplay, penned by Randall Wallace, for its melodramatic and historically inaccurate portrayal of the events . The film's long runtime and uneven pacing were also points of contention, as were the performances, which some felt were overshadowed by the film's focus on spectacle over substance.

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Pearl Habor Both Praised And Panned By Critics

However, Pearl Harbor did receive praise in some areas, particularly for its visual effects and Hans Zimmer's score . The film was nominated for four Academy Awards, winning in the category of Best Sound Editing, a testament to its technical achievements. On the flip side, it was also nominated for six Golden Raspberry Awards, including Worst Picture, highlighting the divisive nature of its reception .

Michael Bay, known for his high-octane action sequences and grandiose storytelling, brought his trademark style to Pearl Harbor , making it a visually stunning yet controversial film. The movie's release reignited debates over the balance between entertainment and historical accuracy in war films, with some viewing it as a disrespectful dramatization of a tragic event, while others appreciated it for its ambitious scope and emotional impact.

As Pearl Harbor becomes available on Tubi, it will undoubtedly draw in both new viewers and those revisiting the film. Whether for its historical portrayal, its dramatic love story, or simply its status as a significant work in Michael Bay's career, Pearl Harbor continues to evoke strong reactions more than two decades after its initial release.

Pearl Harbor hits Tubi on Sept. 1.

Source: Tubi

Pearl Harbor (2001)

A tale of war and romance mixed in with history. The story follows two lifelong friends and a beautiful nurse who are caught up in the horror of an infamous Sunday morning in 1941.

IMAGES

“Pearl” Movie Review
Pearl Movie Review
Pearl (2022)
Pearl review: a star is born (and is very, very bloody)
PEARL (2022)
Pearl (2022)

COMMENTS

Pearl movie review & film summary (2022)
Things are less luminous inside the home, where Pearl's life of isolation and grave unhappiness is no anomaly: her father ( Matthew Sunderland) is literally in a wheelchair, sick and wordless, and always needs tending to. And while "Pearl" is a monster movie, Goth's character has a villain of her own, her mother Ruth, portrayed with ...
Pearl (2022)
Pearl. Filmmaker Ti West returns with another chapter from the twisted world of X, in this astonishing follow-up to the year's most acclaimed horror film. Trapped on her family's isolated farm ...
Pearl
Full Review | Original Score: 8.5/10 | Jul 12, 2024. Mia Goth dominates the film, given pretty much the entire screen to fill and the runtime to stretch her legs - this is entirely her domain ...
'Pearl' Review: A Farmer's Daughter Moves Up the Food Chain
In "Pearl," which Goth wrote with West, she repeats that role, playing Pearl as a horny and homicidal farmer's daughter. That's not the setup for a dirty joke, and this prequel, set in ...
Pearl review: a slasher prequel that makes the original even better
Image: A24. But what really makes the movie interesting is how it builds on, and adds layers and texture to, its predecessor. X made it clear that Pearl was full of spite and envy, yearning for ...
Pearl (2022)
Pearl: Directed by Ti West. With Mia Goth, David Corenswet, Tandi Wright, Matthew Sunderland. In 1918, a young woman on the brink of madness pursues stardom in a desperate attempt to escape the drudgery, isolation, and lovelessness of life on her parents' farm.
Pearl Movie Review
Parents Need to Know. Parents need to know that Pearl is the horror prequel to Ti West's X (2022). It's set decades earlier, in 1918, and tells the story of how the creepy elderly woman in the first movie became a homicidal maniac (Mia Goth plays the character at both ages). It's extremely bloody and gory but well made….
Pearl review: Mia Goth melts down as a serial killer in the making
Pearl is best viewed as its main character's movie-obsessed vision, everyone else in it mere supporting players to the swirl in her head. Meanwhile, a pig carcass gathers maggots on the front ...
Pearl review: Mia Goth is breathtaking in a flawed horror prequel
Pearl turns back the clock to tell Pearl's story starting in 1918, when she's a bright-eyed young woman (still played by Mia Goth) with big dreams of making it in the movies. The problem is ...
'Pearl' Movie Review: Ti West and Mia Goth's Unholy Prequel
'Pearl' Review: Ti West and Mia Goth's Unholy Prequel Doesn't Kill West and Goth re-team to tell the bloody story behind the early years of the killer from their "X," diminishing both the ...
'Pearl' Film Review: Ti West and Mia Goth's Campy 'X' Prequel
'Pearl' Review: Ti West and Mia Goth's 'X' Prequel Delivers More Technicolor Camp Than Horror. The indie exploitation veteran and his starry-eyed leading lady trace the murderous mayhem ...
'Pearl' Review: In 'X' Prequel, Mia Goth Imagines Antihero's Backstory
'Pearl' Review: In 'X' Prequel, Mia Goth Shows Where Her Repressed Antihero Went off the Rails 'The House of the Devil' director Ti West expands his porn-shoot slasher movie into a ...
Pearl review: a star is born (and is very, very bloody)
Pearl is a candy-coated piece of rotten fruit. The film, which is director Ti West's prequel to this year's X, trades in the desaturated look and 1970s seediness of its parent film for a lurid ...
Pearl
Released in the same year as 2022's 'X', 'Pearl' is the prequel to that film and builds on the lore created previously.SYNOPSIS: 'In 1918, a young woman on the brink of madness pursues **** in a desperate attempt to escape the drudgery, isolation, and lovelessness of life on her parents' farm.:Director Ti West is building his reputation from these films and their upcoming sequel 'Maxxxine ...
Pearl movie review: Mia Goth in a horror prequel that marks the birth
Pearl review: Mia Goth in a horror prequel that marks the birth of a new horror icon Filmmaker Ti West's follow-up to 'X' is a masterclass in finding sympathy for the devil Clarisse Loughrey
Pearl (2022)
PEARL (2022) *** 1/2 Mia Goth, David Corenswet, Tandi Wright, Matthew Sunderland, Emma Jenkins-Purro, Alistair Sewell. Filmmaker Ti West's prequel to his X is an origin store of the titular farm girl (Goth in an exceptional, Oscar-worthy turn). Set in pandemic stricken 1918 with WWI at its heights the film offers her background strife with the ...
Pearl (2022 film)
Pearl (subtitled An X-traordinary Origin Story) is a 2022 American psychological horror film directed, produced, and edited by Ti West, and co-written by West and Mia Goth.It is the second installment in West's X film series and a prequel to X (2022). Goth reprises her role as the title character, with a supporting cast featuring David Corenswet, Tandi Wright, Matthew Sunderland, and Emma ...
Pearl Review
A prequel that should've been left on the shelf. Pearl hits theaters on Sept. 16, 2022. Set 60 years before X, Ti West's Pearl — a.k.a. Pearl: The X-traordinary Origin Story — lacks the ...
'Pearl' review: Mia Goth perfects A24's first horror franchise
Pearl. , A24 perfects its first horror franchise. Pearl gets everything right where X gets so much wrong. Horror sequels are nothing out of the ordinary. If a new movie manages to scare up a ...
Pearl
Pearl Review. Texas, 1918. Pearl (Goth) has married a neighbour in the hope of getting away from the family farm and her oppressive mother (Wright) and incapacitated father (Sunderland). But her ...
Pearl Review
September 13, 2022. By. Meagan Navarro. Bloody Disgusting's Pearl review is spoiler-free. Writer/Director Ti West nestled his ode to independent, exploitation filmmaking into '70s set slasher ...
Pearl ending explained: Pearl was going to be a star by any means necessary
Pearl has dreams of being a movie star, but her controlling mother and responsibilities on the farm make it hard for her to pursue them. She refuses to give up, though, and it's her extreme ...
Pearl Review: An X-Traordinary Prequel
Pearl Review: An X-Traordinary Prequel. A24. By Matthew Jackson / Updated: April 18, 2023 1:34 pm EST. ... In some ways, much like "X," "Pearl" is a movie about movies, or rather a movie about a ...
One Of The Best Horror Movies In Recent Years Is Now On Netflix
Pearl, a horror highlight released in 2022, is officially streaming on Netflix, and there are already two sequels available that continue the story.Mia Goth re-teamed with director Ti West after they worked together on X, the movie that launched the horror trilogy.The prequel movie Pearl actually came about while filming X and was notably filmed directly after during the COVID shutdown.
'Pearl' Netflix Movie Review: Stream It Or Skip It?
The year of no lord 2022 introduced us to a new vital filmmaking team in writer/director Ti West and actress Mia Goth, who gave us the year's two best horror movies in X and its follow-up ...
Official Discussion
Ti West, Mia Goth. Cast: David Corenswet as The Projectionist. Mia Goth as Pearl. Emma Jenkins-Purro as Mitsy. Alistair Sewell as Howard. Matthew Sunderland as Pearl's Father. Tandi Wright as Ruth. -- Rotten Tomatoes: 84.
Pearl parents guide: How graphic is the violence and gore?
Pearl is a psychological horror flick helmed by Ti West from a screenplay he co-wrote with Mia Goth. It serves as a prequel to X, the first film in the trilogy.Taking place on a secluded Texas ...
A Controversial 23-Year-Old World War II Film Is Coming to Tubi ...
The 2001 war drama Pearl Harbor is set to make its way to Tubi this September, offering audiences another chance to revisit one of the most polarizing films of its time.. Directed by Michael Bay and produced by Bay alongside Jerry Bruckheimer, Pearl Harbor is a romantic war drama that blends historical events with a fictionalized love story, set against the backdrop of the infamous Japanese ...

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