Pearl film review — Mia Goth claims horror crown with gruesome black comedy

The film industry recently held a conclave and the red smoke ascended to the sky signifying that a new Scream Queen had been anointed: Mia Goth, petite purveyor of psychopathology. It’s been a swift ascent for the 29-year-old London-born actor of Brazilian-Canadian extraction, starting with minor and supporting roles in Suspiria, High Life and the decidedly non-horror Emma. Now she is a bona fide star, judging by last year’s rompy horror X, next week’s Infinity Pool and this week’s Pearl, a prequel to X that re-teams her with shockmeister-on-the-rise Ti West. (She and West also co-wrote the new film.)

Goth’s status is exactly the kind of success her alter ego here, movie-star manqué Pearl, dreams of achieving. It is 1918 and the young hopeful lives with her parents (Tandi Wright and Matthew Sunderland) on a ramshackle farmstead in a rural crevice of Texas. Her husband is away fighting in the first world war, which leaves our libidinous heroine with little to do but work, especially since the influenza pandemic has tamped down socialising. Her only fun comes from weekly visits to the local picture house, where the sight of chorines kicking up their exposed legs thrills Pearl, as does the attention of the cinema’s handsome, raffish projectionist (David Corenswet).

Goth, with her massive eyes and exaggerated features, braids primly tied up in vintage lace, turns the girlish enthusiasm up so far that the dial almost breaks. If you haven’t seen X you might at first think: gee, she seems like a sweet kid. And then she kills a goose with a pitchfork and feeds it to her best friend, a voracious alligator who lives in the nearby lake. If Pearl is more than a little unstrung, that’s no surprise given how stern her mama is, with a severe Germanic attitude towards work and no time for her daughter’s dreaming. Things take a turn when Pearl resolves to take revenge on a cruel world.

From the opening credits with their cursive retro font to the end crawl that plays over Goth making a deranged face, the film harks back to vintage B-movies about crazed young ladies, the palette adjusted in post-production so that all the reds pop like fireworks. There are references to “stag films”, connecting Pearl to the 1970s adult film industry of X, but it’s easy to enjoy the film as a standalone treat, full of gruesome black comedy and even unexpected moments of poignancy. At the centre, Goth holds your attention like a black hole, irresistible and deadly.

★★★★☆

In cinemas from March 17