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

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.