Weird and twisted and macabre, as a pastiche and with the way horror movies were made in the 70s, Pearl returns one of the characters from xTi West’s film, released in early 2022. A protagonist whose head, perhaps, doesn’t work as it should.
The film is a prequel to x -which is available to Amazon Prime videos; you’re welcome- and now the lead actress of that, Mia Goth, co-wrote the script with the director of the original film.
And yes, it has something, if you want to look it up, of Psychosis and of The Wizard of Oz.
The film deals with the theme of a pandemic (the Spanish flu, in 1918) and reflects on how the experience of confinement can incubate two other “diseases”: dysfunction and fear.
sixty years is nothing
What is surprising, from the outset, is that the action takes place just over 60 years before the original film. And even on a farm… What isn’t there, of course, is there Jenna Ortega (merlin).
In x, a clear exponent of slasher cinema, set in 1979, Mia Goth played two characters. One was Maxine, the young woman her partner wanted to turn into a porn star, and … Pearl, the elderly woman with cognitive disabilities who, with her husband, owned the barn on the farm they had rented to unsuspecting filmmakers .
Now, we said, it’s 1918, and Pearl, very young, has mixed feelings. She on the one hand awaits the return of Howard, her husband, from the battlefront in Europe of the First World War, which she sees as the way out, the only way out. Is that she on the farm she overburdens herself, due to the demands of her strict mother of hers. Her father (Matthew Sunderland) is bedridden after suffering a stroke and even needs to be cleaned when he goes to the bathroom.
Pearl has a “pet”, a female crocodile who feeds, for example, a goose – which she gives an evil look and something else – and, when the time and the need arises, she could give her a human.
Pearl has a dream: to be successful as a dancer in silent films. He rehearses in the stable, under the eyes of his cow friend, and when his mother, an immigrant from Germany (Tandi Wright), who fears anti-German sentiments in her new country, asks him to go shopping in town (she wears a mask), takes advantage of it and sneaks into the movies.
And takes a sip of the morphine he buys for his father.
Meet the Projector (David Corenswet), there’s a certain attraction, and if Howard doesn’t come back, now that the War is coming to an end, maybe, in one of those…
Pearl’s disturbing behavior, for those who have not seen xGradually it will intensify. Unhappy and dissatisfied, she may have sex or something similar with a scarecrow. And she waits to see the monologue that at one point her sister-in-law (Emma Jenkins-Purro) nails.
Filmed in New Zealand, Pearl has everything to become a horror classic. And how are you preparing the sequel to x, MaXXXine…
“Pearl”
Terror. USA/Canada/New Zealand, 2022. 103′, SAM 16. From: You west. With: Mia Goth, David Corenswet, Tandi Wright, Matthew Sunderland, Emma Jenkins-Purro. Rooms: Cinépolis Recoleta, Houssay, Avellaneda and Pilar.
Source: Clarin
