‘Pearl’ Brings Fresh Ingenuity to Horror

Ti West breathes new life into the horror universe with his new film Pearl. This A24 psychological thriller pushes boundaries of traditional horror and is absolutely skin-crawling.

Ti West, an American filmmaker, released his movie X on March 18, 2022 and his prequel film Pearl was released shortly after. The original film X metamorphosed from violent slasher horror, to Pearl’s boundary-breaking psychological drama. On September 21, 2022, five days after its release, I commuted to Cinemark Watchung and XD to watch the highly anticipated film.

Mia Goth performs as a mentally-distrubed farm girl, Pearl, living in 1918 during the devastation of WW1 and the Spanish Influenza. The film opens with a heartening orchestral swelling, and an angelic Mia Goth dancing graciously in her pink ankle-length dress. Suddenly, the music ceases. Pearl’s mother bursts into her room and shames her for her dancing foolishness. 

The film takes an instantaneous shift – one that is haunting. It is depicted as if The Wizard of Oz met Chainsaw Texas Massacre and Carrie. The film bursts with colors: reds, greens, yellows, and blues, and from the surface, appears as only an innocent, minimalist tale of a young girl. In the progression, Pearl shares a deep resentment and misery to her life on the farm, along with the aching sorrow caused by WW1 and the Spanish Flu. We watch as she gradually explores her unrestrainable insanity. The dialogue is brilliantly constructed in a way that invokes horror by the writing alone. One particular scene, that bored horror into my mind, was Mia Goth’s screaming and thrashing,

“No! I’m a star! Please, I’m a star!” as she is pulled off-stage in her blood-red dress. The acting has many incredible performances by Goth, who exhibits her range of emotions from hatred, murderous intent, sadness, to devastation. Most notably, her fabulously bone-chilling performance of gasping and sobbing through a six-minute single-shot monologue. Mia Goth performs these lines perfectly, with a memorable excerpt,

“I never wanted you to feel jealous. It’s an awful feeling like a rot the way it twists and turns at your insides. I know that aching so well. I feel it. Whenever I see others whose lives come easy because the truth is, I’m not really a good person…” Pearl is a rare example of fresh originality in modern-day horror. It raises the bar for what we define as “horror,” using familiar concepts but with new authenticity. It manages to make the hair on the back of your neck stand up from Goth’s look of murderous desire. 

Pearl is a visually vibrant, macabre, gradual unraveling of psychosis that utilizes acting and dialogue for a good scare. The film even frightened Martin Scorsese, where he stated in an interview,

“… ‘Pearl’ makes for a wild, mesmerizing, deeply – and I mean deeply – disturbing 102 minutes.” Pearl is skin-crawling, it’s grotesque, it’s horrifying, and it’s absolutely brilliant. 

You can watch Pearl at your local theater, and will soon-to-be on streaming services.