William Earl Spoiler alert: The entire plot of “Pearl” and “X” will be discussed in this article. Who knew a church dance tryout would result in one of the year’s strongest film monologues?
That’s the case with “Pearl,” Ti West’s twisty, hallucinatory ode to Technicolor-era film. It’s the prequel to this year’s grimy porn slasher “X,” in which Mia Goth played an aspiring XXX actress as well as a makeup-laden, nearly-unrecognizable elderly woman named Pearl who ended up killing most of the film crew staying on her farm.
In the latest film, Goth takes on a third role of Pearl as a young woman. This serial killer origin story finds Pearl trapped on her family farm in 1918, with her husband Howard a world away from Texas while fighting in the war, leaving her to keep up the chores for her strict German immigrant mother and invalid father.
Dreaming of a life dancing on the silver screen, she soon turns homicidal after being scolded by her mother, rebuffed by her projectionist lover and “mercy killing” her father, who would just be dead weight on her journey to film stardom.
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