Ti West’s X, released last year, was a Seventies-set slasher about pornographers working on the sly in a remote Texan farmhouse. It was a pleasingly nasty work, if limited by its questionable reliance on treating the ageing body as a source of repulsion. Pearl is its (far superior) prequel, a film written in two weeks by director Ti West and his star Mia Goth, shot in total secrecy and scrawled in bloodied guts and impotent rage. It is a wholly different beast – a tragicomic portrait of a woman so unable to process the falsity of her daydreams that it drives her to murder and mayhem.
In X, Goth played a wannabe pornstar named Maxine and, under layers of prosthetics, an elderly woman named Pearl who craved and resented Maxine’s youth. This film, set in 1918, sees the young Pearl living on the same farmstead featured in X. She is the daughter of immigrant parents, who shield themselves away out of fear of the burgeoning influenza pandemic and the risks they face due to their German heritage. Pearl’s husband, Howard (Alistair Sewell), has been sent to the Western Front. Pearl’s father (Matthew Sunderland), it’s suggested, succumbed to the flu and was left paralysed. Her cruel mother (Tandi Wright) resents her new role as caregiver, and grows especially abusive when it comes to Pearl’s reveries.
