Following a nearly seven-year-long hiatus from feature filmmaking, director Ti West made a bold return with 2022’s X, a brutal love letter to radical 1970s independent movies. In that film, Pearl was introduced as an octogenarian serial killer who viciously offed most of the cast and crew of a porno. 

This prequel (starring an incredible Mia Goth who also takes a co-writing credit) tells her origin story, rewinding to 1918 where the young Pearl is slowly losing herself in a panic of isolation, fantasy and repressed sexual desire. Her husband is away at war and a flu pandemic is raging outside. Pearl’s German mother Ruth (Tandi Wright) rules with an iron fist while her wheelchair-bound father (Matthew Sunderland) requires constant care; something that the young anti-heroine has to provide.

The two movies were filmed back-to-back in New Zealand during lockdown, and both are set on the same Texas farm. A third film which takes place in the 1980s, MaXXXine, is currently in production and will complete the trilogy. Both films released so far take great care in their references to cinema history, with Pearl presented in glorious Technicolor and paying twisted homage to the classic golden age of Hollywood filmmaking. If great cinema holds up a mirror to society, then West’s trilogy seems like it’s playing out as a mischievously perverse detour into the psyche of humanity, clinging to hope and frantically reacting to and distracting us from the horrors of reality. Despite being set in the past, its obvious parallels with the modern day speak to collective feelings of loneliness and dread.

Pearl loves the movies. When she makes trips into town to pick up her father’s medication, she visits the picture palace for escape and entertainment. While there, she meets a projectionist (a charismatic David Corenswet) who opens her eyes to the potential of cinema in unlocking her dreams of becoming a big star. The pair whet each other’s appetite for fame: he dreams of making porn and she is full of blind ambition to become a successful dancer. An intimate, flickering scene casts the viewer’s eye to an adult film entitled A Free Ride that may be considered the earliest of its kind and was sourced from the Kinsey Institute. Sex and death motivate Pearl, with West generating a horribly seductive canvas of bloodshed and sheer desperation.

A combination of West’s dazzling world-building and Goth’s enjoyably unhinged powerhouse performance (which includes a melodramatic nine-minute long monologue that peels apart the essence of a woman afflicted by circumstance and rejection) makes this a compelling character study and multi-layered, dark fairytale. Everything is gleefully exaggerated and meticulously designed to draw the eye, ear and mind into Pearl’s warped vantage point as she slips deeper into violent behaviour. The continuous score by Tyler Bates and Tim Williams, and richly realised cinematography by regular collaborator Eliot Rockett, furthers the uncanny ambience and this film’s tribute to 1930s/40s Hollywood.

References to The Wizard Of Oz and 1954’s A Star Is Born flutter stylishly throughout, with Goth wonderfully channelling Judy Garland at various points. In one scene, Pearl embraces a scarecrow, takes him for a dance, and then gives him a good seeing to. It’s all delivered tongue-in-cheek with hilarious bad taste, but the film doesn’t appear to be laughing at Pearl. It works to lighten the mood in juxtaposition to her intense and claustrophobic home life that plays out like Bergman meets What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?

Pearl works on multiple levels. It’s comical and grotesque yet engaged in the truth that life rarely plays out as expected. An actor or indeed anyone involved in showbiz has to learn how to roll with the punches because they will just keep coming. Pearl hasn’t been afforded with privilege or the tools to do that, and the closing credits play out with Goth looking directly to camera and impressively holding a smile that eventually morphs to reveal a pained expression. West draws back the curtain to reveal a startling portrait of obsession and ambition, and how a lifetime of disappointment and rejection shapes Pearl into the monster we finally meet in X.

Pearl is in cinemas from Friday 17 March.