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Pearl (2022)
Fans of the Brian De Palma classic Carrie will have a head start with Pearl, Ti West's follow-up to his earlier release this year X that provides the same grisly atmosphere that X did, as it attempts to provide a backstory for one of the characters in that film, actually producing a much more compelling film than the first one.
Pearl is a teenager in 1918 trapped on an isolated farm house being brow beaten by her miserable harridan of a mother who starts speaking German when she's really angry and being the primary caretaker for her father, a virtual vegetable in a wheelchair. Pearl seeks stardom, any kind of stardom in any facet of show business, anything that will get her away from this farm and when a national dance company comes to town to hold auditions, Pearl sees this as her way out.
Ti West's 28th film as a director is so delicately crafted and mounted with such love of moviemaking. This film appears to have been made back to back with X because I'm pretty sure the farmhouse where this movie is the same farmhouse used in X. The stylish opening credits immediately clue us into the fact that we're about to see something very special here, something along the lines of a child's fantasy guaranteed to make us smile. Less than five minutes later, we see Pearl stab a goose with a pitchfork and feed it to an alligator.
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It's the ugly relationship between Pearl and her cold-blooded mother that is the true anchor of this film, that really brought me back to the relationship of Carrie and Margaret White in Carrie. There's a begrudging respect that Pearl has for her mother, but she also blames
her mother for her miserable life and she knows that everything would be better if her mother would just die. And that's the other troubling part of this story...Pearl's wrath extends far beyond her parents and several people suffer at the hands of Pearl that really don't deserve it.
This Pearl character is such an enigma that we can't help but envy her, pity her, and be terrified of her and the character is so much more three-dimensional than she was in X. West and his cinematic muse Mia Goth must share credit for the creation of this character that is so beautifully mounted that it made me think about re-watching X, something that hadn't crossed my mind until I saw this film that I liked a lot more than X. Gorgeous cinematography and film editing (West also did the editing) deserve props as well. This is another one of those "traffic accident" movies...you just don't want to look, but you can't look away either.
Fans of the Brian De Palma classic Carrie will have a head start with Pearl, Ti West's follow-up to his earlier release this year X that provides the same grisly atmosphere that X did, as it attempts to provide a backstory for one of the characters in that film, actually producing a much more compelling film than the first one.
Pearl is a teenager in 1918 trapped on an isolated farm house being brow beaten by her miserable harridan of a mother who starts speaking German when she's really angry and being the primary caretaker for her father, a virtual vegetable in a wheelchair. Pearl seeks stardom, any kind of stardom in any facet of show business, anything that will get her away from this farm and when a national dance company comes to town to hold auditions, Pearl sees this as her way out.
Ti West's 28th film as a director is so delicately crafted and mounted with such love of moviemaking. This film appears to have been made back to back with X because I'm pretty sure the farmhouse where this movie is the same farmhouse used in X. The stylish opening credits immediately clue us into the fact that we're about to see something very special here, something along the lines of a child's fantasy guaranteed to make us smile. Less than five minutes later, we see Pearl stab a goose with a pitchfork and feed it to an alligator.
It's the ugly relationship between Pearl and her cold-blooded mother that is the true anchor of this film, that really brought me back to the relationship of Carrie and Margaret White in Carrie. There's a begrudging respect that Pearl has for her mother, but she also blames
her mother for her miserable life and she knows that everything would be better if her mother would just die. And that's the other troubling part of this story...Pearl's wrath extends far beyond her parents and several people suffer at the hands of Pearl that really don't deserve it.
This Pearl character is such an enigma that we can't help but envy her, pity her, and be terrified of her and the character is so much more three-dimensional than she was in X. West and his cinematic muse Mia Goth must share credit for the creation of this character that is so beautifully mounted that it made me think about re-watching X, something that hadn't crossed my mind until I saw this film that I liked a lot more than X. Gorgeous cinematography and film editing (West also did the editing) deserve props as well. This is another one of those "traffic accident" movies...you just don't want to look, but you can't look away either.