Film Review: PEARL (2022)

PEARL **** Canada / New Zealand / USA 2022 Dir: Ti West. 103 mins

Ti West strikes again with his prequel to X (2022) which saw a young group of filmmakers setting out to make an adult film on farm property owned by Pearl. PEARL (2022) focuses on it’s namesake when she was a young girl in 1918, during the Spanish Flu pandemic.

Mia Goth has another chance to display her superb acting talents as Pearl during her desperate attempt to escape isolation and her controlling mother. As she feels increasingly stifled, she descends into insanity realising her dreams may not come true. Without Goth, I don’t believe this film would have worked anywhere near as well as it did. She achieves the perfect balance of naiveté and rage. Her character reminded me of Stephen King’s Carrie, only with a little more complexity and a whole lot more insanity.

Her monologue was a superb portrayal of a mentally ill young woman that emersed the audience into her world as she began to spiral.

As a huge fan of X (2022), I was entirely satisfied with Pearl’s origin story and only marked it down as I would have liked a little more violence and gore. Similar to X (2022), West uses time to build the tension before Pearl unleashes the insanity and murderous rage that has been building. Sadly this did make some of the film feel like it was dragging but the wait does pay off.

This does stray a little from the typical horror film types, focusing heavily on the drama for the first two acts. Luckily we had Goth’s performance and the father is a creepy character, even with his disability. Matthew Sunderland did a superb job at acting with only his eyes, which certainly isn’t an easy task.

The cinematography is flawless thanks to Eliot Rockett, who manages to add tension and focus the attention of the audience. This allows them to really feel the story.

It may be more timid than X (2022) but it is a seriously enjoyable film.

Review by Poppy Blundell

PEARL is available to rent/buy in the USA on Amazon Prime Video and available to pre-order on Amazon Prime Video in the UK

PEARL is out now in the USA on Blu-ray + DVD + Digital and DVD and is available to order via the links below:

PEARL will be released in the UK on Blu-ray and DVD on 23rd June 2023 and is available to pre-order via the links below: