The Venice film festival is springing some surprises on us, and one of the biggest and nicest has been the news that Mia Goth is an actual superstar: she is fiendishly good in this outrageous shocker from director Ti West, an origin-myth prequel to his previous film X, shot back-to-back on the same location. Goth starred in that one too, of course, but is now a co-writer on the followup; she takes her performance to the next level: Goth is now the Judy Garland of horror. Her work on the closing credits sequence alone deserves some kind of Golden Lion.
The film itself is terrifically accomplished and horribly gripping, with golden-age movie pastiche and dashes of Psycho and The Wizard of Oz. And anyone tempted to look down on the horror genre might want to reflect that it is horror director West who has led the way in commenting on our key issue — his film is about the pandemic and how the lockdown experience incubates dysfunction and fear.
The year is 1918, some 60 years before the action of X. Goth plays the eponymous Pearl, a young woman who is working hard on the family farm, longing for the return of her husband Howard who is away fighting in Europe — and she is also dreaming of making it as a dancer in the movies. The war is coming to an end and the Spanish flu is almost over, although Pearl still has to wear a mask when she goes into town on errands.
