Film Review: X / Pearl (A24) Dir. Ti West
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2022 was a bona fide HUGE year for new horror. There were a slew of titles from filmmakers who were doing their best to inject the genre with a new sense of vitality. People who cared about filmmaking as a whole, who inhabited their movies with deeper writing, vibrant direction and characters who were damn compelling.
For me, horror is a genre of filmmaking that generally sits just above rom-coms in terms of styles that I will attend. If you hear someone cackling like some sort of hybrid of a witch and a hyena while the previews are going on, it’s most likely me and it’s also likely to be for an upcoming horror film. What horror I do like, I tend to love. But man, there is so much absolute trash from over the last four decades, especially from this century, that I started to just assume I would never see another horror film I loved again.
Sadly, that didn’t happen with Ti West’s two films from 2022, X and Pearl. People raved about both and a third is already done filming, so it’s obvious they were both successful enough to continue making another. But neither film, while both have a lot of qualities I liked, manages to truly bust through as both original and exciting works.
For X, set in 1979 (right before the age of video), a small group of pornographers rent a house on a farm from an old couple who are a bit…well…odd. The old man greets guests at the door with a shotgun, for instance. The young folks begin filming while the old man is in town and then, once filming has been suspended for the day, the homicides begin.
But it takes an awful long time for things to get interesting and the film lacks a sense of urgency even when blood begins to spill. Director West has a fantastic way of setting up scenes and I appreciate his relaxed filmmaking, but it’s a little too relaxed even for my liking. To the point where, even when things start popping off, it still feels empty.
The strange thing is that the characters are all well filled out and every actor brings a lot to each one. I didn’t even know who was in it before I watched it. I was surprised to see music star Kid Cudi (or Scott Mescudi as he’s known when acting), Pitch Perfect’s Brittany Snow and currently everywhere Jenna Ortega (Netflix’s Wednesday).
Cudi is a strong presence as a former Marine who just wants to get high and get laid. He has a truly hysterical scene where he answers the door completely naked and is silhouetted against the moon and you see something giant just…erm…swinging. Snow also shows she has more range than those Pitch Perfect films - here she’s a real cool, sexy chick who tries not to let things get her down. The find appears to be Mia Goth in the dual role of Maxine, the porn producer’s (the producer looks a lot like West really wanted to get a Matthew McConnaughey type) girlfriend who likes cocaine and Pearl, the old woman of the house. Goth has much more to do in Pearl, the prequel.
Pearl, taking place 61 years before X, takes place on the same farm, except now it’s nearly technicolor in its visual vibrancy. The style is old cinema and Goth really feels at home as younger Pearl, who just wants to go somewhere else and become famous. Instead, she’s stuck on the farm with her paralyzed father and her strict German mother. The mother doesn’t stand for any sort of nonsense, no matter how slight. She certainly doesn’t like it when Peal says she spent the extra money from picking up liquid morphine for her father on candy (actually a trip to the local cinema, which would be even worse to admit).
Pearl, as played by Goth, is a dreamer and it seems (at first that is) that her mother is just being too strict. But little things begin to trickle in (like that goose she spears with a pitchfork and then feeds to the alligator in the nearby river) and Pearl becomes more and more unhinged. Goth does a mighty fine job of being 100% in Pearl’s skin, giving every ounce of herself to the performance.
But, while Pearl is in some ways superior to X in its style and its characters, it doesn’t do much better in the tension or horror departments. Pearl goes crazy and starts killing people about as blandly as she and her husband did in X. The last killing, however, had some genuine tension and you just hope and pray that the person actually gets away. So that death holds a deeper meaning than the rest.
The end results leave me puzzled by why these two films caused such an uproar of praise. Both are competently made and feature solid characters and performances, but neither is a game changer for the genre. If both films, particularly X, are supposed to be part of a new “grindhouse” world, neither succeeds because they fail to go all in on the design. If the praise is because the films don’t feature a single stupid person, which is a huge horror cliche - you gotta have a bunch of stupid people to kill off because it’s easier to digest than people who are substantial in any way - then hooray?
West is obviously a talented individual and I look forward to seeing what he does next, and will actually go to the theater to see the forthcoming MaXXXine when it’s released. And Goth has a new film coming out by Brandon Cronenberg this month title Infinity Pool that looks very intriguing, so I’m interested in what she’s up to. Just still scratching my head to why so many fell in love with this pair of films.
Rating:
X - 2 1/2 stars (out of 4)
Pearl - 2 1/2 stars (out of 4)
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