Top Movies of 2022: No. 12 - Pearl: An X-traordinary Origin Story

12. Pearl: An X-traordinary Origin Story, dir. Ti West

No horror director had a better 2022 than Ti West. He did not make just one great movie this year, he made two. Both of his movies in his new franchise were in New Zealand during the pandemic, both starred Mia Goth, and both were set in the same primary location. We rarely see this kind of efficiency in a theatrical release, to just reuse the same sets and maybe even the same man-eating gator. It feels very old Hollywood or the classic B-movie Roger Corman method of economical production. That is all very appropriate considering how much West's duology traffics in nostalgia.

The first of these movies, X, is an Honorable Mention on this Best Movies of 2022. Set in 1979, X is loving tribute to two genres that were just blossoming that decade: those being Golden Age of Porn and the Golden Age of Slashers. Because after all, we think of the X rating as bawdy, it is the last letter of a very powerful three-letter word, but it was originally intended for all kinds of adult-material. The Evil Dead was infamously rated X and that is only pornographic in its use of goopy slime effects. X is imagining what if Debbie Does Dallas were interrupted by The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

One of the gimmicks of X is its star, Mia Goth, playing two roles. One is the Final Girl, Maxine, performed by Goth as her current beautiful young age. The other is Pearl, the psycho-biddy psycho-killer, played by Goth in many pounds of thick old age make-up. (It is a better make-up effect than it sounds, to the movie's credit.) Because of this dual role, West and Goth were able to make a prequel about their killer's origins, which came out a few months after X. X was a lot of fun, a really solid slasher that proudly spits on the moral guardians of the Seventies, who still decades-later deserve to be spat on. However, Pearl, the movie seemingly made as a bonus feature, is far superior. It is a much darker and more interesting experience.

Where X was about the rise of our modern idea of B-cinema, Pearl is about the rise of motion pictures themselves. It is set in 1918, during the Spanish Flu pandemic, a time where you feared going out to the cinema without a face mask (unimaginable in our times, of course). Pearl, a young woman trapped at home in her small Texas farm, dreams of her husband's return from World War I. She also dreams of being a shining star in 'the pictures'. We're right at the beginning of Hollywood becoming the dominant cultural force of the 20th century. This is when Hollywood could be imagined as purely wholesome, before even the first big actor scandals and first conservative backlashes. If you have nowhere else to be, the movies are the perfect escape.

On top of that, Pearl's projectionist friend (David Corsenswet), has a 1915 stag film hidden away in his bunk. Even back 100 years ago, some people old enough to be your grandparent's grandparents were humping away on the roadside on camera. Nothing is as new as we believe it to be. This is yet another path for Pearl. However, Pearl has no future on the big screen or secret underground projections. Her future is here, on the farm, to be nothing and nobody, while her terrified parents try to contain her, and she is very angry about it.

Mia Goth's performance as Pearl is an amalgamation of a many different film icons. Sometimes she's as sweet and innocent as Judy Garland. Pearl is technicolor pastiche on the Wizard of Oz, complete with a scarecrow hanging on the bright sunny all-American cornfields. But then, Pearl is pouring her repressed sexual energy onto the strawman, to remind us there there is no Emerald City at the end of this yellow brick road. Our heroine transforms from Cinderella to Norman Bates. She's Annie Wilkes who thinks she is Carrie White. As long as her dreams are only dreams, the whole world is going to suffer.

More than anything, Pearl is a triumphant display of acting. No actor accomplished more acting in a movie in 2022 than Mia Goth did in Pearl. There's a song and dance number inside her mind. There's a fearless soliloquy that she delivers to her poor, trapped sister-in-law, Mitsy (Emma Jenkins-Purro) that goes on for many minutes without a cut. The end credits play over Mia Goth's face stuck in a Joker-esque grimace, that she sustains unblinking for nearly five minutes, until her face is covered in tears and snot. Pearl is constantly demanding that the world recognize her as a star. She'll never get there, but Mia Goth, she is a star.

A lot of movies in 2022 were these tragically earnest attempts to sell their audiences on the power of cinema. This all felt to me increasingly desperate as the medium continues to decline in total viewers. Damien Chazelle's Babylon might have been the worst of them, wasting all of its material on a Whiggish view of cinematic history as this grand arc from the silent era to Avatar. Sorry, none of that works on me. If you're going to be this painfully saccharine, at least throw some irony in there. Have some more depth. Give us a spectacular gross-out murder like Pearl does so often. If the medium is so nakedly desperate to be loved, don't just tell us a story about how great it is. No, use that desperation. Tell us a story about somebody truly desperate to be seen and recognized. And then if you refuse her, she'll set you on fire or feed you to her gator.