Ti West’s Pearl is what happens when you give a slasher movie a Broadway dress rehearsal, a gallon of pig blood, and a desperate need for vintage Instagram filters. It’s weird, it’s loud, it’s oddly pretty, and much like the main character, it’s convinced it deserves more attention than it actually earns.
Billed as a “prequel” to X, West’s grindhouse love letter to sex, slaughter, and seventies sleaze, Pearl takes us back to World War I-era America and centers on a young woman who wants to be a star — the kind with sequins and soft lighting, not handcuffs and psychiatric evaluations. Played by Mia Goth (who also co-wrote the script, which is either brave or self-incriminating), Pearl is a barely-contained bottle of ambition, desperation, and homicidal urges, and Pearlthe movie is much the same.
Now let’s get this out of the way: Mia Goth is phenomenal. She acts circles around everyone else. Hell, she acts figure-eights around the script itself. Whether she’s sobbing at a scarecrow after a horny daydream or delivering a six-minute monologue into the camera like she’s auditioning for America’s Next Top Psychopath, Goth is magnetic. She is Pearl. But the problem is, Pearl the character is running laps in a film that can’t quite decide if it’s Carrie, Wizard of Oz, or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: The Lyrical Cut.
The plot — such as it is — finds Pearl trapped on her family’s isolated farm. Her father is a silent, wheelchair-bound meat puppet, and her mother is a German immigrant so stern she makes Nurse Ratched look like a guidance counselor. Pearl spends her days feeding gators, pitchforking geese, and fantasizing about life beyond the barn. She wants to dance. To perform. To be seen. And she’ll kill whoever gets in her way — sometimes literally, sometimes with a smile so wide it could split atoms.
The movie’s best trick is aesthetic. This thing looks like it was shot in a fever dream of The Sound of Music by a director who passed out halfway through Bambi and woke up in Psycho. The skies are bluer than logic, the grass greener than envy, and the blood? Oh, it’s redder than a prom night confession. West leans hard into the artifice, trying to make murder feel like a musical number. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it feels like you accidentally walked into the wrong theater, and instead of a slasher, you’re watching The Young and the Restless by way of Dexter.
Goth’s Pearl is equal parts tragic and terrifying — a girl who wants to be loved so badly she’s willing to staple her soul to a dream and call it hope. But instead of turning her into a chilling archetype or a layered antihero, West just kind of lets her stew in her own madness until the whole thing boils over in the third act. There’s no escalation, just a slow drip of weirdness: animal murder here, sexual repression there, a dance audition that feels more like a hostage situation.
And the kills? Sparse. Lackluster. It’s as if West forgot he was making a horror film and instead tried to pen a Tennessee Williams play with a body count. Yes, there’s blood. Yes, there’s a pitchfork. But there’s also a whole lot of waiting — for something to happen, for the horror to kick in, for the point to reveal itself. Instead, what you get is a slow descent into insanity padded by long silences and artsy angles that feel like West whispering, “Look how clever I am,” from behind the camera.
Let’s talk about the monologue. You know the one. It’s the dramatic centerpiece of the film, a close-up shot of Goth delivering a confessional so intense it feels like you’ve walked in on someone reading their therapist a suicide note. It’s well-acted. It’s raw. But it also feels like the movie’s trying to cash in all its chips in one go. It’s less storytelling and more, “Hey, give me an Independent Spirit Award or I’ll set the projection booth on fire.”
That’s the thing with Pearl: it wants to be too many things at once. A character study. A horror film. A technicolor melodrama. A tragedy. A sequel that’s actually a prequel that’s secretly a metaphor about the delusions of American exceptionalism — or maybe it’s just a cautionary tale about the dangers of repressing your inner showgirl. Who knows.
Sometimes it’s effective, like when Pearl dances in front of an empty stage or cuddles up next to her father’s corpse like it’s open mic night at the Bates Motel. Other times, it just feels indulgent — the cinematic equivalent of a teenager reading Sylvia Plath in a cemetery while vaping.
There’s also the matter of tone. Pearl is trying to do a high-wire act — balancing genuine horror with camp, art-house with grindhouse — and it wobbles hard. You’re never quite sure if you’re supposed to laugh, cry, or call a wellness hotline. At times, it flirts with brilliance. Other times, it’s just flirting with itself in the mirror.
Supporting characters come and go like background noise. There’s the projectionist who exists solely to be creeped out, then disposed of. There’s the perfect blonde sister-in-law who shows up just to trigger Pearl’s inferiority complex and then exits stage left in a pool of blood. Nobody feels like a person; they’re props for Pearl to pin her madness on.
And yet… there’s something hypnotic about it all. Pearl is not a good film, but it’s not a bad one either. It’s ambitious. It’s weird. It’s got a lead performance that deserves better than the movie she’s trapped in. It’s the kind of film that tries so hard to be unforgettable that you almost forgive it for being so uneven.
Final Verdict:
Pearl is a mood swing in film form — a beautifully shot, emotionally chaotic, occasionally brilliant mess. Ti West shoots for the moon and lands somewhere in a haunted barn. It’s not scary enough to haunt you, not clever enough to admire, but just weird and committed enough to make you wonder what you just watched. Mia Goth gives it everything, but in the end, it’s like watching a ballet danced in quicksand.
You’ll either love it, loathe it, or stare at the end credits thinking, “Well, that was… something.” And maybe, for a film about a girl who just wants to be remembered, that’s enough.
