Directed by Ti West
Written by Ti West & Mia Goth
Based on Characters by Ti West
Produced by Jacob Jaffke, Ti West, Kevin Turen, Harrison Kreiss
Starring Mia Goth, David Corenswet, Tandi Wright, Matthew Sunderland, Emma Jenkins-Purro
Cinematography Eliot Rockett
Edited by Ti West
Music by Tyler Bates & Tim Williams
Production companies Little Lamb, Mad Solar Productions
Distributed by A24
Ti West shot Pearl simultaneously with X, a film that has the somewhat dubious distinction of being an excellent slasher flick and an equally good porn flick, featuring a multi-layered and challenging plot and some solid acting.
Mia Goth was striking as Maxine, an aspiring porn actress who craved a more legitimate career in Hollywood. She also played Pearl, the elderly farmwife who co-owned the property Maxine’s film was being shot on. It wasn’t until late in the movie that I realized that Goth was playing both characters, and it wasn’t just because of the prosthetics needed to make Goth appear to be a woman of about 80 years; the mannerisms and voice were totally different.
But it wasn’t until now that I got a fuller sense of the demands Goth so successfully met, playing not only Maxine and elderly Pearl, but also at the same time playing a young Pearl, sixteen in the late stages of World War I and the Spanish flu pandemic. Goth, 29 at the time of filming, is as wholly convincing as a teenager as she was of a woman of 80.
While distinct from one another, the three characters echo one another strongly. Both young Pearl and Maxine are wildly ambitious, promiscuous, and deeply disturbed. The elder Pearl has had her ambitions thwarted (as shown at the end of Pearl) but is still sexually acquisitive and psychotic.
While Pearl has some sexually explicit content (mostly in the form of a grainy black-and-white French rudie that a friendly projectionist shows to Pearl) and a goodly amount of grue, it is softer edged than was X. But it is far more chilling.
Goth’s character is mesmerizing, a young girl who superficially seems bright, inner-directed and pleasant, but gradually reveals a much darker personality. She tortures and kills small farm animals. She physically abuses her paralyzed and infirm father. Already married (her husband is in Europe as a WW1 soldier), she is weirdly promiscuous, sexually assaulting a scarecrow at one point.
Her actions get more and more out of hand as her dreams of becoming a movie showgirl are dashed, culminating in the deaths of many of the people around her. Her husband returns home to find her sitting at the family dinner table with two corpses and a rotting, maggoty meal. The final five minutes (including credits) are an extraordinary procession of facial expressions on Pearl’s face as her final mental decompensation takes place. It’s one of the most stunning bits of acting I’ve ever seen.
West and Goth are co-writing the third film in the series now, MaXXXine, which will be about Maxine some five or ten years after the events of X. It’s going to be hard to top Pearl, but this amazing duo might just pull it off.
The first two movies were shot on a budget of just one million dollars. About the only special effect in Pearl was Theda, the crocodile.