Film review: Pearl is a disturbing psychological horror that works well thanks to star Mia Goth
Mia Goth in Pearl
★★★★☆
All pearls start out as a tiny speck of grit, and there’s certainly no faulting (16s) — played by Mia Goth — for ambition. Abandoned by her husband Howard, who has volunteered to fight in the trenches of WWI, and marooned on a farm under the thumb of her domineering mother Ruth (Tandi Wright) and the dead-eyed gaze of her paralysed father (Matthew Sunderland), Pearl is tortured by the idea that life is elsewhere.
Determined to become a star and escape her stultifying existence, Pearl decides to audition for a dancing troupe — a reasonable dream for a dungaree-clad country girl to have, you might think, if you hadn’t already seen Pearl pitchfork a goose and feed it to an alligator that lives in a nearby swamp. Pearl, you see, is no ordinary ingenue with dreams of glory: she’s a young woman in whom ‘a malevolence is festering’.
Directed by Ti West, who co-writes with Mia Goth, Pearl is a disturbing psychological horror that opens with brightly colourful scenes of farm life (so preposterously idyllic that it all seems inspired by Douglas Sirk) before introducing our eponymous heroine, a woman who seems sweet and wholesome but is actually a sociopath who appears to be entirely unaware of her capacity for lethal violence (we note, with interest, that she lives on Powder Keg Farm). The blend should be jarring; that it works so well is due to a tour-de-force turn from Mia Goth, who is both naively child-like and brutally ruthless, and often within the space of the same scene.
A long-winded monologue/confession from Pearl near the end takes a little heat out of proceedings, but otherwise Pearl is a gripping, off-kilter and blackly comic thriller.
(cinema release)
