The star of Texas slasher 'Pearl' doesn't shoot; she stabs

Most of us want to be famous, yes? I risk assuming too much and blowing my cover here, but to be American is to believe that you are one fateful encounter away from riches, fame, adoration.

It’s Lana Turner at the soda fountain. It’s Toni Braxton singing to herself at a gas station pump, and it’s Justin Bieber posting a video to YouTube. Heck, it’s TikTok queen Brittany Broski trying kombucha for the first time.

You’re a star in waiting, and you could be taken away from all this, swept into your daydreams, if you just got a stab at it.

If that were true, Pearl is the greatest star by far. And oh boy, does she get to take a stab.

Coming to Austin Film Festival 2022:Sundance winner and Paul Mescal drama set for the fall event

Director Ti West titillated South by Southwest this year with the fantastic “X,” his clever grindhouse homage/slasher flick about a group of hot young things shooting a 1970s porno in an East Texas barn under the watchful, murderous eyes of its owners, including one very randy old lady who’s just a facelift away from Norma Bates. In that film, indie darling Mia Goth played both Maxine, the "final girl" convinced of her porn star destiny, and Pearl, the crone thirsting after her flesh, with no preference as to its temperature.

West has returned just months later with a prequel, “Pearl,” filmed back to back with “X.” And so has Goth, performing some occult ritual to perfectly merge the threads of her two characters into one, playing a World War I-era Pearl and joining West as co-writer. You don’t need to see “X” before "Pearl," though it will help with the history-repeats-itself payoff.

About six decades before she’ll butcher a bunch of sexed-up kids during the Carter administration, the Pearl of the prequel is a wide-eyed farm girl dancing her way through delusions that she'll be the next Theda Bara. There’s a pandemic on, and her husband is off to war as the world crumbles. She’s left with an austere mother (Tandi Wright) and an invalid father trapped in his own body (Matthew Sunderland).

Desperate to escape cow-centric, gator-infested anonymity – which, to be fair, seems plainly awful – Pearl looks for a ticket out wherever she finds it: in an audition for a touring dance troupe, in sweet promises from a sexy movie projectionist (David Corenswet) and in the way a body tumbles so easily down a root cellar when it all goes wrong.

Pearl, you see, was born wrong, as so many bloody movie monsters were. And you know what they say about trying to break into the industry. It’s brutal.

Read Eric Webb's review'X' brings sex, violence and holy ghosts to the cinema of sin

"Pearl” rules. It rewards genre film nuts around every corner. West’s prequel sheds the grimy exploitation-flick grain of “X” for Technicolor tableaus and rapturous, orchestral swells straight out of a Douglas Sirk melodrama. He assembles perfect little dioramas, lets the figurines crack every time things get wild, and then bounces back into a fantasy that’s increasingly nightmarish. Thrill to Pearl’s cornfield waltz with a scarecrow against an azure sky; choke on your popcorn when she starts humping the scarecrow.

Yes, like a knock-knock joke in a power outage, “Pearl” also is pitch-black funny. (The laughs aren’t usually punchlines – more like that GIF of Julia Louis-Dreyfus in “Veep,” nervously chuckling and mouthing “What the (expletive)?”) This sense of humor vaults "Pearl" over its indie-horror station into something really special, a movie you’ll find yourself passing along to other curious travelers.

And no one seems more happy to guide you along this blood-soaked road than Goth, giving the kind of stunner performance that makes people hope that a film genre of ill repute might, just once, sneak into an Oscar race. Her Pearl guilelessly believes that her hunger for fame can dispel suffering, and pursues that belief with breathtaking guile. You root for the bumpkin with the megawatt smile and the murder-ready axe. She’s Luanne Platter by way of “The Bad Seed.”

So captivated is West by Goth’s performance that he trains the camera on her for two extended shots toward the end, with no cutaways. One is a third-act monologue that peels back the red-velvet curtain on our starlet’s interior rot – real sizzle reel stuff for Goth. The second comes at the very end, and we won’t spoil it, but it encapsulates the entire ethos of “Pearl”: a little ridiculous until it’s suddenly horrific.

More entertainment stories'You feel like you're flying': Aerial dancers coming to Seaholm Plaza this month

Prepare yourself for our heroine (?) to follow you, though. If we might scry for a moment, “Pearl” is sure to inspire girl-boss memes and social media adoration of the “good for her” sort. It'll be a little too easy for the internet to identify with this fictional murderess.

Pearl will get her fame. Our willingness to give it to her, and to covet it, might be the film’s killing blow.

If you see 'Pearl'

Grade: A

Starring: Mia Goth, David Corenswet, Tandi Wright, Matthew Sunderland

Director: Ti West

Rated: R

Running time: 1 hour, 42 minutes

Watch: In theaters

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Pearl movie review: Mia Goth's star doesn't shoot, but she stabs