Pearl * * * *

I watched X again last night, just to bring me up to speed.  After all, it had been nearly a year and a lot of films since I first saw it.  Now the sequel (not prequel) has arrived.

Pearl is slicker than X.  Indeed its a better production but it lacks the same energy.  Nevertheless Pearl is good in it's own right.  It's rather like a Judy Garland turns psycho.  At one stage she even dances with a scarecrow.  

The story shows only a few days in the life of the young Pearl, but when it comes to murder that's pretty well all the time she needs to get rid of people who seem to be spoiling her career aspirations. She can be quite efficient at times.

Set in 1918. The first world war has just finished, but in the meantime Spanish Flu has descended upon the world, ready to take as many mortal souls as the war did.  It's a good analogy to Covid and something we can all relate to.

Sshhh... he's still thinking

Pearl lives on a farm with her humorless cruel mother and her seriously infirmed father. Still young and pretty she married at tender age, but her husband went off to fight in the war. Soon he will come home.  In the meantime, Pearl  has more or less reverted to the old structure of doing what she is told, doing her chores, and being treated like a silly girl by her mother.

She lives in a dream world: desperate to be a dancer on the stage. She wants to be a star.  Not unusual for  a girl in her teens.  But I guess what makes Pearl different is that her frustrated ambition makes her psychopathic. 

Fetching the medicine for Pa one day, she meets the projectionist of the town cinema. She falls for him, or does she just look at him as a magician as he projects her dreams upon the screen, along with her first taste of pornography?

Her sister-in-law is wealthy but nice to Pearl in a condescending way.  And Pearl likes her too - that is until they both enter the same talent quest.  Mum, Dad, Projectionist, sister-in-law and a cheeky goose.  All of them are seen to be frustrating her ambitions. Someone has got to go - or perhaps all of them?

It's beautiful to look at with faithful reproduction of time and place, overlaid with a sense of nostalgic cinema - and no shortage of black humour.

Mia Goth wrote the screenplay with director Ti West, and I cant help but wonder if that is why a long, long, long one-take monologue is in there (look what I can do!). I'll bet you a pound to a penny heaps of critics will be suckered in by that scene.  Plain fact is, it's what drama students learn to do in year one.  It's what actors on the stage do all the time.

Mia Goth's greater achievements in this film are to be found in other scenes like shyly flirting with the projectionist, talking to her unresponsive father, giving an excruciating dance audition, and of course swinging an axe or using a pitchfork with that look on her face. She's good at that too!