On Tubi, I watched Pearl, a 2022 horror/dark comedy film directed by Ti West, co-written by West and Mia Goth. The film was the second in West's X film trilogy, beginning with X in 2022 and ending with MaXXXine in 2024. X focused on a group of people making a porn film in 1979, renting the farm of the elderly couple Howard and Pearl, and becoming the victims of the couple's serial killer depravity, with Goth portraying both the aspiring young star Maxine and the elderly Pearl. Pearl is a prequel, set in 1918 when Pearl is a young woman, living with her German immigrant parents on a farm, and she is married to Howard (Alistair Sewell), who is overseas fighting in WWI. She resents being stuck working on the farm, when all the farmhands are off in the war, and living with her strict mother Ruth (Tandi Wright) and her paralyzed father (Matthew Sunderland). As the Spanish flu pandemic is ongoing, Pearl's mother insists that she stay close to home, stay masked when going to town, and stay isolated. Pearl wants to be a chorus girl or a movie star, to be a star and travel and live a life of adventure, and her mother, who is also stuck with taking care of her husband as if she is his mother, shuts down Pearl's dreams, wanting her to get her head out of the clouds and be more realistic about life.
Pearl shows signs of being violent and expressing rage, through killing animals and feeding them to an alligator (named Theda, likely after the silent film star Theda Bara), dancing with a scarecrow in the field and masturbating with it, and bathing naked as a grown woman in front of her infirm father, taking advantage of his lack of speech or movement to express her more disturbing side in front of him.
On her visit to town to pick up medicine for her father, she goes to the movies, and meets the unnamed projectionist (David Corenswet), who flirts with her and invites her to come by again. She also finds out from her sister in-law Mitsy (Emma Jenkins-Purro), a more upper-class dainty lady compared to Pearl's working-class farm life, that there will be dance auditions at the local church for a traveling troupe, and Pearl is determined to make it into the troupe as a ticket out of her hellhole of a life.
As the film progresses, Pearl becomes more mentally disturbed, which becomes more evident to others, and the film spirals into Pearl becoming a serial killer and destroying everybody in her life. Despite the film being labeled as horror, I thought the movie was hilarious in a dark way, mainly due to Mia Goth's excellent performance in throwing herself into Pearl's deranged actions. When she dances with the scarecrow, she goes from romantic playful dancing to throwing the scarecrow down and yelling "I'm MARRIED!" When she visits the projectionist, his idea of seduction is showing her an illicit underground porn film (the real-life 1910s stag film A Free Ride), and it felt reminiscent of Taxi Driver, where the character Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro) is trying to woo a woman he likes and takes her to a porn film on their first date, and she's disgusted by it. But it works on Pearl, and they later sleep together off-screen.
The film was shot in New Zealand, and the use of the pandemic as the backdrop came from the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-21. The film opens in the style of a Technicolor film, with big names in old movie trailer script font, and echoes The Wizard of Oz in the farm setting with Pearl dreaming of escaping and exploring a bigger world. The film's final shot of Pearl holding onto a pained smile as the credits roll over her and the music reaches high strings that go from sounding like a romantic triumphant ending to sounding more sinister and horrific was fantastic. The film's cinematography Eliot Rocket looked gorgeous, and I loved how in the finale, Pearl switches from her overalls to wearing her mother's red Belle Epoque dress, looking more old-fashioned and out of time.
I really loved this film, and Mia Goth should've gotten an Oscar nomination for this incredible performance, especially for her standout monologue scene in which she tells Mitsy, as a practice stand-in for Howard, everything she wants to tell him about why she is the way she is, making a disturbed heroine much more understandable and sympathetic in her difficult circumstances as a character study. While I've heard that X and MaXXXine aren't as good as this film, I would still check them out to complete the trilogy.
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