Pearl

 It's a fucking miracle, I tell you. We would be lucky any year that gives us a slasher film as good as X (which came out before I kicked this blog to life again, but here's my review: It's great and go watch it already!) But it turns out that Ti West had gotten the green light for his next film from A24 before that one was in the can, so he shot a prequel back-to-back, reusing the location and Mia Goth.
 Now we're in the enviable position of having two kick-ass Ti West movies released within less than ten months.

 Pearl begins with a parallel opening to X; In X, it was a very clever shot moving towards the entrance of a barn from inside, the darkened threshold dropping away and slowly expanding the aspect ratio to widescreen as the police arrived to a crime scene. In Pearl, the barn door is shut - and when the doors open, instead of the semi-desaturated, sun-drenched carnage of the earlier movie, we get an eye-popping, glorious technicolor view of the farm as it was back in 1918.

 It's set at the tail end of the first world war and during the influenza plague (both of which have a tangible presence throughout the film), yet the tone and style of the movie are closer to the fifties, and yes, more specifically to the films of Douglas Sirk, from the title lettering to the heightened melodrama.
 (I should note I've only seen one of Sirk's movies; I didn't particularly like it, I barely even remember it... but I feel I have a decent handle on him thanks to his influence over others like Haynes and Ozon. Philistine! Boo! Hiss! And all that, I know, I know.)

Ahem.

 Pearl is a melodramatic character study about Pearl (Mia Goth), a small town girl who worries that she will waste her life at a farm in the ass-end of nowhere. She's exuberant, funny, completely relatable, and a hot mess of a sociopath.
 We get our first taste of all this - and a good illustration of how the movie will go down - with her first scene, where she feeds the animals at the barn while charmingly bantering with them, cute as a button. She shows them her dance moves. Then a goose interrupts, so she kills it with a pitchfork and feeds it to Theda, the alligator in the pond out back.

 An origin story, then, for the monster she'll become (in oldface) in the sequel... or maybe by the end of this one. But this is not a slasher movie; The colorful cinematography, period-appropriate music and heightened, slightly histrionic acting are not (just) an aesthetic choice, the movie follows suit and puts the melodrama front and center.
 It's easy to see what would drive Pearl - who isn't very stable to begin with - to murder people before we get a single drop of (non-goose) blood. Her mother (Tandi Wright) loathes and resents her, partly with good reason, though you have to wonder if it's a chicken-and-egg situation; her father (Matthew Sunderland) is an invalid who can barely move his facial muscles (one of the funniest gags in this very bleakly hilarious movie is how much better he gets at emoting as the movie goes on). Pearl's husband is off in the war, fate unknown.
 She's trapped in a life she abhors.

 Pearl dreams of running away, of being a dancer in the movies. But of course we know she's never going to leave the farm, since she'll be there fifty-odd years later killing porn people and a many implied others, feeding their remains to a descendant of the same crocodile that ate that goose. It's a cruel trick - I really wanted that loveable psycho to pull her shit together!
 I wonder how this would have played if I hadn't seen X before, without this air of inevitability.

 The drama is very compelling, but it's also a remarkably funny movie. A nasty streak of gallows humor runs through most of Ti West's films, but this might be his most overtly comedic while never actually spilling over into comedy; all of the jokes are situation and character-based.
 In fact, one of the most dramatic and tense scenes - a prolonged monologue where Pearl opens up to her husband, camera tight on her face (in a fair world this scene would get Goth Oscar attention) is undercut with the pitch-black humor of knowing someone is sitting across the table while she confesses to increasingly awful things.

 When the killing finally starts it's good fun, too. It's not quite as gruesome as in X, but there is some pretty graphic dismemberment that West and his crew somehow manage to make beautiful. There aren't any gags with people saying lines that act as ironic foreshadowing to their deaths as in X, but all the implements of murder are lovingly presented before they're eventually used. The pitchfork even gets a ominous 'shhhhing' sound when it's first wielded; great stuff.
 The music is varied and excellent, full of reedy winds and the occasional carillon. And the acting is all-round excellent, with Mia Goth giving a terrific performance, both unhinged and grounded.

 As for themes, there are some interesting references to cinema itself. A projectionist friend of Pearl shows her an early pornographic film, which of course ties to X, but Pearl is obsessed with escapist musical reels instead; we see her as she imagines herself a few times throughout the movie, both in an extended war-themed musical number and in short, sad (to our eyes) black and white vignettes. Cinema as a release valve from an unpleasant situation in an unpleasant era. And X of course was about the porn boom of the seventies, but also about indie filmmakers not too far from Ti West's heart (just in a different, slightly less respectable genre.)

 All of West's movies have been good to great so far, and this year we got two of his very best yet. Pearl might be my favorite out of the whole lot. He's already working on the capper to this trilogy, so hopefully we'll be able to see what Maxine got up to after ending Pearl's history. Can't wait.