Ti West’s Pearl is a welcome (and bloody) addition to the X Cinematic Universe
Mia Goth attains Movie Star status in one of the year's best films, horror or otherwise

With Pearl, writer-director Ti West both embraces and elevates what horror movies can do, in a way that further solidifies his standing as one of the best things to ever happen to the genre.
A prequel to West’s terrifying X—his second film in the “XCU,” with a third, MaXXXine, on the way—Pearl tells the bloody and tragic origin story of its sexually charged, identity-starved title character, played by Mia Goth, in a performance worthy of Movie Star status. By mining Pearl’s history, a violent (and at times intentionally Grindhouse-y) cautionary tale about the dangers of suppressing one’s desires, both carnal and otherwise, West taps thematically rich veins in ways that few of his contemporaries have ever explored in this space. Working with a script co-written by Goth, West effortlessly wields Pearl’s trauma-laced backstory like a scalpel while his star slashes her way through the film’s 102-minute run time, catapulting Pearl into the ranks of horror’s most satisfying and unsettling marriages of character-first storytelling, as well as making it one the year’s best movies of any genre.
Pearl trades in X’s gritty, late-’70s porno visual aesthetic for a technicolor palette as West draws back the curtain on the origins of Goth’s very old, very murderous iteration of Pearl in X. Her violent downfall starts at the end of World War I, in 1918, when Pearl’s attempts to flee an insular life on a Texas farm lead to a Tinseltown eager to prey on dreamers like her. Pearl uses movies to escape not just from her day-to-day life, but from her fractured self. In doing so, she becomes imprisoned within a nightmare of her own making.
Pearl’s obsession with movies blurs the boundary between aspirations she wishes were real and a reality she seems incapable of accepting. Her husband wages trench warfare abroad while she’s stuck at home with an emotionally abusive German mother (Tandi Wright) and a creepy, wheelchair-bound father (Matthew Sunderland). Pearl sets out to be a star, with disastrous results: though her fantasies are full of fantastic color, she applies a black-and-white mentality to achieving them that leaves zero room for nuance or error. Pearl’s inability to adapt to the harsh consequences of unrealized expectations leads her down a deadly path, especially as she becomes increasingly aware of her tenuous grasp on reality.