This is the grim warning spoken to the titular character by her horrified mother in Ti West’s slasher pastiche Pearl, a film about the impossibility and danger of human connection. Pearl is the second film in West’s X trilogy. The first, 2022’s X, is set in 1979, following a band of aspiring pornographers as they attempt to produce a low-budget skin-flick in an empty barn owned by an elderly couple, Pearl and Howard. X stars Mia Goth, Suspiria-style, as both Maxine, a bubble-gum chewing, blue-eyeshadow wearing preacher’s daughter desperate to achieve stardom by any means necessary, and Pearl, the decrepit farmer who, along with her husband, picks off the porn stars one-by-one.
In Pearl, Goth returns to flesh out the backstory of the murderous crone from West’s first instalment. In 1918, Pearl is a lonely young woman who lives on an isolated Texan farm with her German immigrant parents. Her husband, Howard, is off at war; her mother, Ruth, is a stern religious woman who disapproves of Pearl’s ambitions to become a dancer; her unnamed father is paraplegic, a victim of the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic which provides the eerie backdrop for the film’s action. Doubly trapped by the invisible threat of a virus and perceived anti-German sentiment in the midst of World War 1, Pearl retreats into her movie-star daydreams, punctuated by the odd spot of animal mutilation.
Filmed secretly during the 2021 COVID-19 lockdown, Pearl provides a disquieting reminder of the isolation and unease of the height of the pandemic. An early scene in which Pearl sips from a bottle of morphine underneath her mask while gazing rapturously at the dancers on the screen in a nearly-deserted picture house hurtles the viewer back to those strange moments in between lockdowns when the world would re-open just to close again, and flickering images on a screen – whether laptop, phone, or cinema – had to take the place of real human connection.
The titular character is hungry – for physical touch, for love, for sex, for fame, for adoration
For Pearl, truly, is a film about longing for connection, tinged with the fear of what might happen if you were to be seen as you truly are. The titular character is hungry – for physical touch, for love, for sex, for fame, for adoration – but every time she reaches out to connect with someone she is rebuffed, scaring everyone away with the depths of her rage, desperation and need. As she cycles across fields of corn, dances frenziedly and has questionable dalliances with a scarecrow, Pearl resembles an ecstatic, deranged, and finally murderous Dorothy Gale desperate to escape her dull farmstead. West’s gorgeous technicolour wide shots, clever juxtaposition of score and content and winking allusions to everything from Texas Chainsaw Massacre to The Wizard of Oz elevate the plot’s fairly standard slasher fare.
As a stand-alone film, Pearl might fall a little flat; when viewed in the context of West’s X trilogy, it showcases Mia Goth’s impressive range and the director’s skill at walking the fine line between pastiche and homage, while setting the stage for West’s third instalment, MaXXXine, due to begin filming in April.
