Pearl (

2022

) ½

Well, this is unexpected! After I greeted X (2022) with a resounding yawn and a dismissive shrug, I had little hope that its spin-off/prequel would warrant anything more. After all, the whole thing reeks of a Roger Corman-style cheapo where the sets and stars from one film are hastily re-purposed for a new project. If the A24 version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) left me cold, then I wasn't exactly thrilled by the prospect of A24's The Terror (1963). However, Pearl turned out to be a pleasant surprise being not only a solid film in its own right but actually enhancing the previous movie in retrospect. It does beg the question, why was writer-director Ti West hiding this light under a bushel? Surely it would have been a better idea to lead with this film and follow up with X (2022). Not only does it go in chronological order of events but also there's a reason why the better film always gets top-billing at the double feature!

Pearl takes place on the same blighted farm in the middle of nowhere Texas as X (2022), only it's 60 years earlier and shot in a digital approximation of technicolor instead of the washed-out Super 8 style of its predecessor. The goal here, as in X (2022) is to evoke a bygone era of film, though since the film is set in 1918, the style it's chosen to use is about twenty years ahead of time. Admittedly this “not-technicolor” is more than a little distracting at times, giving the whole production an uncanny, Instagram filter look. However as the film goes on you get used to it and it becomes less of an issue, though Mitsy, Pearl's blue-eyed friend/sister-in-law, never stops looking like she's wearing luminescent contact lenses.

Here Pearl is a young woman, rather than a veritable mummy, living on the same farm as before with her stern German mother and invalid father. Life on the family farm was depressing drudgery for Pearl, who always dreamed of the glitz and glamour of the big city and show business, but lately, it has become especially intolerable. Her father's sickness and the wartime anti-German sentiment have put a strain on the family finances, meaning every cent must be accounted for and there isn't even money left over for Pearl to buy a couple of pennys' worth of candy when she goes into to town to fetch her father's medicine. The only release Pearl has for the misery is to ritualistically murder animals around the farm, a move that I doubt is helping the family's financial situation. Indeed it seems rather odd that Pearl's mother will begrudge her three cents for candy but not all the lost eggs from a murdered chicken.

It doesn't help that Pearl's young husband, Howard, has left her to go off and fight in WWI, a move which he regards as standard patriotic heroism and which Pearl considers tantamount to abandonment. Indeed, her relationship with her husband is quite complicated. On the one hand, Pearl craves love and affection more than anything else. She wants to become a famous dancer specifically so she can bask in the adoration of large crowds. Howard does give her this affection but by virtue of being a normal guy who just wants to be a farmer he also acts as an anchor that keeps Pearl stuck on the farm. She loves and hates him for exactly that reason, longing for him to come home and secretly wishing that he just dies so she can be free to pursue her dream without any hindrance. It's why she willingly bore his child but then confesses that she was happy to see the babe die. It probably shouldn't come as much of a surprise that Pearl all but leaps at the first chance she gets to have an affair. She starts to go out with a roguish film projectionist who is in way over his head, as he probably assumes Pearl is just a wanderlust-struck farm girl and not a psychotic murderer.

Pearl's relationship with her domineering mother and invalid father is simpler than her relationship with her husband but follows the same pattern. She loves her father but is frustrated that his enfeeblement means she must devote so much of her own life to looking after him. Pearl's mother inspires no such warmth, and indeed her indifference and even hatred towards Pearl is the only explanation we get for Pearl's madness and violence. Thankfully, the film does not dwell on this explanation, as “Mommy didn't love me” is probably the least compelling backstory for a serial killer imaginable even if it may have the tenuous advantage of being realistic.

It isn't easy to make a character as disgusting and repulsive as Pearl is into a sympathetic figure, it is still harder to do so while allowing her to remain genuinely frightening. Far too often in an attempt to create a sympathetic killer, films will totally de-fang their villains and render them hapless angels that just so happen to murder people here and there. It's a balancing act that requires a deft hand by the writer and a skilled actress to pull it off, and I'm pleased to say that both Ti West and Mia Goth are up to the challenge. The script puts Pearl in an unenviable position of caring for her invalid father while enduring the abuse of her often cruel mother. Naturally, anyone would be distressed by such a situation, which makes the audience empathize with Pearl's plight. What we don't really empathize with is the way Pearl deals with her feelings of imprisonment and abandonment by torturing and killing small animals. Neither the actress nor the script ever lets us forget that Pearl is a crazy sadist that is just one bad day away from a blood-soaked killing spree.

The film culminates in a lengthy monologue, delivered by Pearl as she stares into the camera and explains her dreams, her frustrations, her struggles with her family & husband, and eventually her murders and madness. It's one hell of a monologue that sums up and expands upon the character in interesting ways. Never did I once dream, while watching X (2022) that the spooky, killer grandma in that had anything more complex in the way of motivations than just being plain nuts. Pearl may be loony, but it's a very specific form of madness that is rooted in a very specific character.

The character I'm most struck by, aside from Pearl of course, is Howard, who spends the entire film off-screen only turning up at the film's climax to come face to face with the grisly evidence of his wife's madness. We do not get to see his reaction to this shock but instead close out the film with Pearl's pained, forced smile as she pretends to be the dutiful wife welcoming home her husband. What we do know however is that Howard must be madly in love with his wife because we know from X (2022) that he opts to not only not call the police on this obvious lunatic but even goes on to live with and remain absolutely devoted to Pearl for the next fifty years. It would be no small thing to for a husband to overlook his wife's infidelity while he was away at war, but this is honestly the least distressing thing that Pearl got up to!

Since Howard is a complete non-entity in this movie, this interesting characterization mostly does not accomplish much. However, it does enhance the story of X (2022) by making him a more comprehensible and compelling figure. We don't get any of the actual characterizations to explain Howard's person and his behavior, but we can infer what sort of man would make the choices he makes given the circumstances he finds himself in. The picture that is outlined here is a man that is at once gallant and brave, willing to face any danger on one hand but on the other, he's a man so subservient to his wife's desire and so completely hen-pecked that he will gladly sacrifice every value he holds dear to see her smile.

Of course, this is a period piece set in early 20th-century America, so you know that there will be some trivial detail in the background that will piss off SC the turbo-autist. In this case, the offending detail is an off-handed line where Pearl looks at a newspaper and says that the Allies have liberated France and that this means that the war will be over soon. I can only assume that Ti West has gotten the world wars mixed up because France was never conquered in WWI (Yes, I know it's quite a surprise but believe it or not there are a lot of wars where the French did not surrender). The more charitable interpretation is that the newspaper is referring to the Central Powers being pushed out of all French territory but this isn't exactly historically accurate either as the war ended with the German army still occupying some French territory. Hell, even if the Germans had lost all of the French territory they occupied it would hardly mean that the war was as good as won; this was trench warfare where attacks on well-guarded positions could cost hundreds of thousands of lives and months of battle to take a few miles of ground. Even an almost-defeated Germany could probably have held the Rhine for months in the face of an all-out allied offensive. As far as flaws go this is an admittedly minor one, but it's quite surprising to see given one of the few things I praised X (2022) about was its attention to minor historical details. You can get the shade of Maxine's eye-shadow correct but you can't remember which war was going on in 1918? 

Though I'm guessing that West is not the sort to look at maps, as he has Pearl, the daughter of German immigrants, being baffled when The Projectionist describes himself as a “Bohemian.” In modern usage, it mainly refers to artistic types that prefer a life of whimsy and adventure to actually getting a job. It's certainly a more positive term than NEET! However, the word does have an additional meaning, a person from Bohemia a province in the Austria-Hungarian Empire in 1918, and the modern-day Czech Republic. The film misses a trick by not having the German immigrant Pearl mistake his status as a “Bohemian” as a literal resident of Austria. Surely a good joke could be drawn out of this exchange by having Pearl try to address him in German, and the projectionist looking baffled at her for a moment before he clarifies “Not that kind of Bohemian.”