Film review: Pearl is a disturbing psychological horror that works well thanks to star Mia Goth

Pearl is no ordinary ingenue with dreams of glory: she’s a young woman in whom ‘a malevolence is festering’

Mia Goth in Pearl

★★★★☆ 

All pearls start out as a tiny speck of grit, and there’s certainly no faulting Pearl (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.