Ti West’s prequel to X is a Technicolor melodrama with a horror film inside it, and Mia Goth is the whole reason to see it. The picture around her is slighter than its colours, but she makes 102 minutes pass quickly.
Pearl (Mia Goth) lives on a farm with her mother and her paralysed father. She feeds the animals, talks to the alligator in the pond and wants, more than anything, to be a dancer in the pictures. Her husband Howard (Alistair Sewell) is away at the war and the influenza has everyone in masks. Ti West’s Pearl is a prequel to X, the slasher he released earlier the same year, and it sets out to explain how the old woman with the pitchfork got that way. It is a good film with one remarkable performance in it, and the performance is the reason to go.
West wants a horror film that looks like a studio musical, and Eliot Rockett gives him the colours: a sky the blue of a paint chart, corn the yellow of butter, and a red on Pearl’s town dress that looks as if it would come off on your fingers. Tom Hammock builds the farmhouse out of dark wood and one bare bulb, so that every time Pearl steps outside it is like a door opening onto Oz. Tyler Bates and Tim Williams write the sort of swelling strings Douglas Sirk used to lay under women weeping into their gloves. Malgosia Turzanska keeps Pearl in a blue pinafore for the chores, and nobody involved pretends the film has not seen The Wizard of Oz.
Goth, who wrote the script with West, plays Pearl in a voice pitched high and sweet, like a girl reading aloud in Sunday school, and the trick of the performance is how long she can keep that voice steady while the eyes go somewhere else. She is good at small wrongness: a smile that arrives a beat late, a hand left on her father’s arm a moment past comfort. When the dance number comes it is with a scarecrow in a cornfield, and it begins as a Judy Garland routine and ends somewhere no studio would have let it.
The scene the film will be remembered for comes late. Pearl sits at the kitchen table across from her sister-in-law Mitsy (Emma Jenkins-Purro) and tells her, at length, exactly who she is. West, who edits the film himself, does not cut. The camera stays on Goth for what felt to us like ten minutes while her face goes from pleading to boasting to weeping and back, sometimes inside one sentence. We laughed once, early on, at a line about her husband, and then we stopped laughing and did not start again. It was the refusal to cut that did it: any other film would have given us Mitsy’s face to hide behind, and West gives it to us only when Pearl has finished.
The film around that scene is slighter than it looks. Pearl wants to leave, her mother Ruth (Tandi Wright) will not let her, an audition is coming, and a projectionist in town (David Corenswet) shows her a film she should not see. The projectionist is the weakest strand, a young man written to say the things Pearl needs to hear, and Corenswet has little to do but be handsome and kind about it. The middle hour goes into town and back to the farm more often than it needs to, and when the violence arrives it is quick and blunt, with none of the invention X found for its killings.
As a prequel it also has a problem West does not solve. X told us, in one line and one look, why Pearl does what she does; this film takes 102 minutes to say the same thing, and the extra time decorates the answer without changing it. What it adds is Wright, whose Ruth is hard, frightened and right about nearly everything, and a dinner scene between mother and daughter as tense as anything in the film with a blade in it.
West has made patient horror before, in The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers, films that waited an hour for anything to happen. This is his brightest and loudest, and the patience survives in the way he holds a shot. Watch it after X, not before. On its own it is a well-coloured sketch of a woman the other film had already finished drawing.
