If there was any justice in the world, then not only should Mia Goth be nominated for an Oscar for her titular performance in Pearl she should win hands down. Goth conceived the character alongside director Ti West to take centre stage in their X franchise and the actor is so dementedly committed, so consumed by Athenian rage at the problem of male absence and patriarchal stranglehold of war and pestilence, that Pearl is an instant icon, not only of the horror genre but of any genre. Pearl may be a prequel to West’s brutally accomplished Texas Chain Saw Massacre homage, X but Mia Goth is Pearl.
Watch her hold that impossibly awkward close-up at the end of the film. Her face is as captivating and relentless as a black hole after crossing the event horizon. We can feel the psychopath struggling for legitimacy, her thwarted dreams of stardom forever imprinted on our corneas. We can feel the inevitability of Goth’s star power competing for dominance, possessed by her own belligerent might. We shouldn’t approach, but we just might. Pearl is desperate to fool herself, that rictus grin reminiscent of that line in Fight Club, “the way Meryl Streep’s skeleton would look if you made it smile and walk around the party being extra nice to everybody.”
Abandoned by her Hemingwayesque husband for the lure of The Great War, Pearl is trapped on the farm of her childhood with her Lutheran parents and the ever-present threat of Spanish Flu. Her father is paralysed and the farm hands have long since left. Pearl and her austere mother, Ruth, are left to tend the farm – Pearl the dreamer and Ruth the pragmatic realist who sees through her daughter’s obsession with showbusiness,
“Please mommy, you have no idea what I’m capable of” pleads Pearl desperate for recognition, to which Ruth coldly responds like an exorcist, “Malevolence is festering in you, I see it.”
Pearl’s world is a Technicolor horror show masquerading as Douglas Sirk film. Like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, who says, “It’s funny how the colours of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen,” Pearl – through illicit swigs of her father’s morphine – can only experience the world when it has been transformed into art. Whether that is through the Palace Follies book she hides from her mother, or the nascent silent films she conjures herself into as the star, Pearl is increasingly furious with her lot in life as a woman, a wife and the daughter of hard-working farmers persecuted for being German.
But whether Pearl is writhing in cornfields with a scarecrow Onibaba style or feeding corpses to her pet alligator Theda, nothing compares to her heart-breaking monologue to her all-American sister-in-law Mitsy, simultaneously both her hero and rival. Pearl sits across the table and sucks us into the same vortex Robert Shaw created when delivering the Indianapolis speech in Jaws. Jesus, it could be the same table. We feel crestfallen for this wicked woman, breaking her heart with absolute sincerity.
Mitsy asks Pearl to speak to her as if she were Howard and what we get is sublime, a deep understanding of her own character and the character Mia Goth has precision engineered, a rampaging attack on fate combined with a powerlessness to escape its clutches, the black hole subsumed by a supermassive black hole, “Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night and the fear washes over me, ’cause what if this is it? What if this is right where I belong? I’m a failure. I’m not pretty or naturally pleasant, or friendly. I’m not smart, or funny, or confident. I’m exactly what Mama said I was, weak. I don’t know why. What did I do? Why wasn’t my family like yours? I hate what it feels like to be me and not you.”
Roll on the third instalment of the X franchise, MaXXXine.