What makes a person into a monster? Is it a response to a life of trauma and bad breaks, or were they born that way? Or is it a little bit of both?
In the fall of 1918, Adolf Hitler had been on the front lines of World War I for four years. He was sitting in a field hospital, where he was recovering from a mustard gas attack that left him temporarily blinded. When he heard the news that Germany had surrendered, he went blind again. Hitler never got over the emotional trauma of his army’s defeat on the battlefield, and the narrative that the Jews, the Marxists, and the racially impure had “stabbed Germany in the back” formed the core of Nazism.
One factor in Germany’s defeat that perhaps didn’t occur to Hitler was that 900,000 of their soldiers caught the flu. The 1918 flu pandemic started at an Army base in Kansas and was unwittingly shipped to warring Europe by American troop transports, where it spread like wildfire in the cramped, unsanitary trenches. When director Ti West’s new film Pearl opens, the rural Texas community where the title character, played by Mia Goth, lives is struggling to keep going as the second wave of the 1918 flu pandemic sweeps over them.
Pearl lives on a farm that will be familiar to those who have seen X, the slasher homage West and Goth released earlier this year. She lives with her mother (Tandi Wright), a German immigrant who is none too happy about the way the war is going, and father (Matthew Sunderland), who is paralyzed and completely dependent on his family. Though the carefully tended farm looks idyllic from the outside, the dynamic between Pearl and her stern, demanding mother is increasingly toxic. Pearl’s husband Howard (Alistair Sewell) is in Europe fighting with the Allied Expeditionary Force, and she’s chafing under the demands of farm life and caring for her invalid father. Pearl’s only escapes are the fleeting trips to the local movie theater, where she sees Thea Bera, film’s first sex symbol, as Cleopatra. It’s the dancing chorus girls in a “soundie” (short films played between features that were the precursors to modern music videos) called “Palace Follies” that really catch her eye. She plays out her fantasies of dance and fame before a captive audience of cows and sheep in the farm’s little barn, away from the disapproving eyes of her mother.
Maybe it’s the little hits of morphine she skims off the top of her daddy’s medicine, but Pearl doesn’t feel like other people, and the pandemic-induced isolation hasn’t done her state of mind any good. The only person who seems to understand her is the theater projectionist (David Corenswet), a self-described “bohemian” type who is pretty easy on the eyes. Pearl struggles with unfamiliar feelings of lust — she’s already married, after all — but when he offers to take her away to Europe, where they can rake in the cash making stag films, she falls for him. When her sister-in-law Mitsy (Emma Jenkins-Purro) tells her of a dance audition at the local church for a touring vaudeville show, it sets her on a collision course with her family obligations that will end well for no one.
If you’ve seen X, you know that Pearl never does escape that farm. She’s too dangerous to walk among the normals, and she knows it. This prequel is all about the creeping revelations of her murderous nature, and the titanic failures of nurture that set her on a path to destruction. Goth and West came up with the idea for Pearl while devising a backstory for the villain in first film, and dove right into Pearl once A24 saw the early cuts of X and immediately green lit the prequel. Her final monologue, in which she confesses everything that’s been going on in her mind to a horrified Mitsy, is an instant classic, but she’s spellbinding in every frame of this film. West shoots Pearl like it’s a Douglas Sirk technicolor melodrama — think Imitation of Life, with more beheadings. There’s another Goth/West film in production, which finishes the story of Maxine, Goth’s porn star character in X. Based on Pearl, all I have to say is, shut up and take my money.
Pearl
Now playing
Multiple locations
