It’s easy to see why Ti West was drawn back to his rural Texan universe for Pearl, the follow-up to last year’s X: in Mia Goth, he’s found an actor whose terrifying energy spills out of her characters. I’m sure Mia is lovely. But she scares me, more, probably, than any actor alive. As the credits roll on Pearl, she looks straight down the camera, holding a threatening rictus for what must be upwards of a minute. It’s that very quantifiable creepiness, the protagonist’s unfettered insanity, that carries Pearl. Though the filmmaking skill on display is exemplary, the rest feels more like an entertaining prequel to X than a new horror classic in its own right.
Pearl, then, who we might remember as the unrecognisably aged-up antagonist from X, is a bit of an odd duck. Naïve and idealistic as only a shut-in teenager can be, she’s introduced to us talking to the animals on her family farm, sweet and innocent as a real-world Disney princess. Technicolour visuals and a swelling orchestral score harken back to The Wizard Of Oz and The Sound Of Music; later, a delightful shot will perfectly mirror Mary Poppins. Where X doubled as a brilliant homage to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Pearl almost does the same for Singin’ In The Rain.
I say almost, because pretty soon Pearl’s stabbing farm animals with a pitchfork and feeding them to her pet alligator. Kids these days, am I right?
That ‘these days’ barb is important, because Pearl is a film which wears its modern-day parallels on its sleeve. Set in 1918, at the height of the Spanish Flu pandemic, Pearl’s mother is deathly worried about bringing sickness into the house, not least because her father is already deathly ill. Their dynamic is, shall we say, strained – Pearl wants nothing more than to ride into town, go to the movies and become a dancer. Her mother thinks she’s being selfish (which is, to be fair, the least of her many foibles).
It’s nice to see West returning to the inter-generational conflict explored in X, and in a way Pearl’s very existence adds a new texture to the original. Where the first film could be read as a more specific fight between pre and post-war values, Pearl shows the conflict to be far more universal, where the unresolvable differences between old and young are destined to leave someone with a hatchet in their neck.
Not that Pearl is actually particularly gory. Just as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is probably more bloody and violent in memory than on our old VHS tapes, West has found an odd similarity between Tobe Hooper’s 1974 classic and the technicolour blockbusters which preceded it. Though Pearl does boast a reasonable kill-count, the camera rarely lingers on the violence itself. While that might deny audiences the thrill of seeing what amounts to a mad Disney princess up to her elbows in blood, the restraint on display is actually impressive. If anything, it just makes the horror elements weirder.
So while on the surface, Pearl might lack some of the out-and-out spookiness one expects of the genre, just like X there’s plenty going on under the hood. It might lack some of the genre thrills and, pardon the expression, meatiness of the first film, but as far as prequels go, this is a more than worthy addition to the rural horror canon.
Oh, and Mia Goth is still terrifying. I’ve booked tickets for Infinity Pool already.
Pearl releases in cinemas from March 17th.