The horrifying continuation of a Hollywood villain is back and her bloodline is next on the docket.
Mia Goth and Ti West make cliche films, plain and simple. But somehow they’re revamped into something far more gritty and unholy. In March of this year, Goth and West premiered their slasher film, X, in which a group of pornographic filmmakers and actors gather on a deprecated farm, to film a movie with the permission of its elderly owners. One of them being the mononymous, Pearl. Long story short, she and her husband, Howard devise plans to kill each and every one of them. Now, 6 months apart from the first film, the two young creatives now offer Pearl’s backstory on an unbalanced platter of Hollywood grotesqueness.
Goth, originally from London, is a convincing murderess, just as she is an innocent, Southern beauty. This time Pearl is shown in her younger, doe-eyed years on the exact farm where the X massacre takes place decades later. We begin in 1918, the Spanish Flu is ravaging one-third of the world’s population, and Pearl is longing for a life beyond the farm and her tempered family. She dreams of a glamorous lifestyle filled with acknowledgement and praise. She endlessly prays for God to “make her the biggest star the world has ever known.” As seen in the trailer, she’s cloaked in denim overalls and a plumped-sleeved dress, mirroring a teenage Judy Garland in The Wizard Of OZ. Though, I don’t think Dorothy would ever dream of killing her Aunt E, or even her beloved ToTo, with a pitchfork.
We’re taken on a technicolor carousel of emotions as Pearl picks away at her own youthful tenderness, and replaces it with a deranged teenage psycho. She’s happy, cheesing her pearly capped teeth in one scene, as she sashays for casting agents at an audition. In the next, she’s tuning out blood curdling screams with red splattered across her milky complexion. From X to Pearl, we can see how Goth has managed to successfully pull off a dual role of the same character, who’s shown at two different ages in her lifetime. Ti West, the director, described Pearl as “typical in which a person yearns for “another life,” yet that new life is atypical from the one we’d expect her to evolve into.”
We find that behind the desperation for glitz and glamour, Pearl is in great need of real love that she never received from her family. “The pictures”, as she calls them, are filled with girls dancing their way into the hearts of American viewers. Though she’s aware of the terrible things she’s done, in the end of the trailer, she exposes her true feelings in which she just wants “to be loved from as many people as possible.”
We’ll be sure to love our darling Pearl once again, as she makes her villainous return/debut in theaters on September 16.