I know what I’ve done. Bad things. Terrible, awful, murderous things.
I’d been told to be sure and stay to see what happened after the credits when I watched X, so I did and I was glad I did. After the credits of X, I was shocked and delighted with what I got: a fake trailer for a prequel movie to X, set in 1918, and, in the same ways that X created a film with the look of the seventies, this prequel mimicked the look of epic family films from the golden age of Hollywood. What a great joke and a fantastic, as I said, FAKE trailer. It wasn’t until the next day that I realized this trailer wasn’t fake. This prequel, Pearl, was already completed; it had been made in secret immediately after the filming of X. Writer-director West and star Mia Goth had worked on the story as a backstory for Pearl’s character in X, but then, when West and his crew found themselves quarantined in New Zealand as COVID-19 shut down film productions everywhere, West made the decision to just go ahead and make a full movie out of this backstory with Goth playing the youthful version of Pearl.
It's a hell of a story and with just these two movies, Goth has established herself as a horror muse for the ages, particularly with her co-writing credit on this film. I’ll say right from the jump that I don’t feel this film is quite as consistently excellent as X. Some of the flaws of this film might just come with the territory. The decision to tell this story in a Technicolor, Golden Age melodrama style was inspired and West absolutely nails every sweeping shot, every melodramatic flourish and oh, that glorious score. That does make it oftea bit hard to build tension quite as effectively as he did in X, so the first half of Pearl doesn’t rachet the dread and suspense up the way X did; it even drags a hair, if I’m going to be perfectly honest. And I’m less high on the ensemble here; I thought everyone in X was pitch perfect, all the way down to the bit players, but some of the performances here didn’t quite work for me or perhaps it’s that the characters aren’t quite as compellingly written or as layered. Is this part of the whole Golden Age pastiche? Maybe, but it didn’t need to be. I will highlight Emma Jenkins-Purro, for instance, as a supporting player here that gives a really wonderful performance.
Regardless, the star of the show here is, once you get past West’s bravura filmmaking, absolutely Mia Goth and this might just be my favorite performance of 2022. At times I feared she was playing up the Midwestern twang a bit too much, but it’s all in service of a slowly unwinding character. Pearl is driven by a desire for fame and excitement, more than just her dull life on the farm, and, just like Maxine in X, she sees a possible escape in the movies. They fuel her fantasies and tantalize with the possibility of an escape route. But there’s a deep darkness inside Pearl and her innocent naïve fantasies of fame and fortune aren’t like everyone else’s, not deep down.
And while I did have some reservations about this movie as I said above, when it takes the turn . . . you know, the ONE, THE turn, it just really knocked me out. There’s a classic audition sequence, of course, where Pearl thinks she might just get her big break and starting with that scene, really of her arriving at the audition, the film just kicked into high gear and Goth just kicked it into high gear and right through until the end, I was riveted, disturbed, deeply unsettled and just blown away by Goth’s performance, first of all, and the visual inventiveness of the film, second of all. Goth gets handed a beast of a monologue that she does in a shot that goes for over five minutes long at one point and no spoilers, but the final shot of this film is one of the most haunting and disturbing final shots ever. Goth just finds the emotions and they are so raw and so compelling. There’s a stabbing scene here where she hits full rage mode in a way I rarely see actors able to do; as someone who has dealt with anger issues in my life, I often find the way actors play rage to ring false to me, but not this time. And in that monologue and then in that final shot, Goth is acting on the level of an icon. I’ve been a fan of Goth ever since I first noticed her back in A Cure for Wellness; I liked her non-traditional looks and the kind of off-kilter air she brought to her performances. I’m so thrilled that she’s gotten these two movies, and, yes, a third coming up, which is a sequel to X. Just for these two performances, she deserves a slot in horror movie history.
Anyway, things on Pearl weren’t quite as tight or precise as they were on X and that makes sense given the way the films were written and then made; but the experience of those last forty-five minutes or so was captivating, compelling, disturbing and intense in a way horror movies just aren’t often enough. Pearl delivers on the gore and the violence, but it’s that dark, endless well of psychopathy that made this movie land on me like a ton of bricks. West and Goth know real horror, the skull beneath the aesthetics of the skin. These two films might just be the best original/sequel pair in horror history and that’s a happy ending right out of Hollywood. 4 stars.
tl;dr – high-concept prequel to X is a magical throwback that, despite its few flaws, ultimately delivers a profoundly disturbing experience; star Goth is acting at a level rarely seen. 4 stars.