The Doctor’s Diagnosis: C
Well this quickly turned into one of the more unlikely franchises in recent memory. Pearl is a prequel to X, which was just released this past March and bombed at the box office with a gross of less than $12 million. Although very few people went to see the original, this prequel was shot at the same time as X and was already completed and awaiting release. And if you think the box office failure of Pearl is a deterrent (it has only made $8 million as of this writing), then you lack business smarts because a sequel (titled MaXXXine) is already on the way. Rarely is a franchise so determined to exist despite a seemingly complete lack of public interest and I have to respect that in a way. These people really believe in this material. I just wish I shared their enthusiasm.
Serving as an origin story for the titular Pearl, who was the killer in X, Pearl is set in 1918 and explains how she became the batshit crazy old woman in the first movie. We learn that Pearl’s husband went to serve in World War I, leaving her to care for her oppressive mother and paralyzed father. Pearl becomes obsessed with movies after being shown a porn film (A Free Ride, which was made in 1915 and is actually one of the earliest examples of porn) by the projectionist at a local theater. In an effort to leave her terrible home life for show business, Pearl attends a local audition and, upon not getting the part, loses her mind and goes on a bloody rampage. Well, a moderate rampage. Actually not much of a rampage. This movie is boring.
Much like with X, the critical reaction to Pearl has left me perplexed. Many critics that I follow and enjoy are glowing about this movie (it even has a rave review from Martin frigging Scorsese) and it makes me wonder if everyone is taking crazy pills or if they are seeing different cuts of these movies than I am. Pearl is primarily a horror film (or at least it is advertised that way) but you are likely to forget that throughout its running time. There are actually only a couple of horror scenes in the film (and if you’ve seen the trailer, you have seen all of them). The rest of the film is a rather dry character study of a young woman driven crazy by the environmental limitations on her ambitions. The constant comparisons being made between Pearl and 70s horror/exploitation baffle me, as I imagine that a film this slow and self-serious would not have been received well by the drive-in crowd back in the day.
Pearl is a film that clearly wants to say something, but I’m not sure what it is. As X revolved around the emergence of home video technology and the porn industry in the 1970s, Pearl is about the emergence of film (and porn) as a major entertainment medium in the 1910s. I guess. While film is used as a plot device in both movies, I’m not seeing any thematic cohesion between the two movies. Is it that the evolution of film parallels the evolution of America in the last century? Is it that porn is at the center of our culture? Perhaps future generations of film students will bore me to death with the answer, but I just don’t see the point of something that is so clearly trying to have a point.
I’m also aware that this is aiming to create some sort of demented version of a technicolor family film. Pearl wears Dorothy’s outfit from Wizard of Oz and then dry humps a scarecrow, so that isn’t exactly subtle. I get it. But again, what is the point? This adds nothing to the plot and certainly doesn’t make the movie scarier, so I just don’t see what this is going for. Pearl is a horror film that values commentary over horror and I don’t know what the comment is.
This film also opens some questions about the gap years before the events of X. Did nobody investigate these murders? Did nobody realize that Pearl is essentially the only suspect? When Pearl’s husband returns home from the war at the end of the film, did he just think “well, I guess we’re psychotic killers now?” Did he not question any of this? I mean, I like to think that I can go with the flow, but there is a limit and I would at least have questions if I returned from combat to discover that my wife is now a murderous maniac.
The saving grace here is the excellent performance by Mia Goth in the title role. She is fascinating to watch in the part, both unhinged and oddly endearing, and it is heartbreaking to see this woman have an emotional breakdown on the way to her inevitable fate. The film closes on an uninterrupted shot of her face that goes on for minutes while she conveys a broad range of emotions, from sadness to madness, that is one of the best non-vocal performances that I’ve seen in years. There is also a long monologue scene that is brilliantly done and has garnered some Oscar talk about Goth’s performance. That will never happen, but it would probably confuse the 17 people that still watch the Oscars.
I just don’t understand the appeal of these movies. Ti West is a talented filmmaker, Mia Goth is an excellent actress and people with far more talent than me are calling these movies masterpieces. But from my perspective, these are over-intellectual attempts to replicate the style of 70s exploitation films without the fun or viscera of that era.
Image by: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_(2022_film)#/media/File:Pearl_theatricalposter.jpg
