Venice Review: Mia Goth In Ti West’s ‘Pearl’

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What’s the matter with Pearl? Plenty, as it turns out in Ti West’s terrifically enjoyable postscript to his spring release X, which saw a 1970s film crew fall brutally afoul of an elderly farmer and his wife while shooting a porno in their barn.

Unusually for a horror film, X had the same actress — Mia Goth — as both the final kill (the farmer’s psychotic wife Pearl) and the final girl (sex-film starlet Maxine), and this intelligent, not to mention almost indecently hasty prequel explains the reasons.Pearl, screening out of competition at the Venice Film Festival, is that rare horror franchise follow-up that, while mindful of expectations from its predecessor’s core gore audience, has considered artful new ways to drill down into the essence of the original.First, a quick digression into the appeal of X and Ti West’s films in general: West has an almost forensic handle on what a period genre movie should look like — a talent showcased very blatantly in 2009’s lurid video-nasty pastiche House of the Devil, and more subtly in 2013’s naturalistic Jim Jones chiller The Sacrament.

But West also updates as he reflects, and X does a very effective job of reminding us that the 1970s were a time of schism: in that first wave of splatter films, killers were often prudish, sexless and resentful of the permissive younger generation — a hang-up that was actually more representative of the conservative film industry of the time than real life.

The swinging stars of X meet their match, however, in the sexually rapacious Pearl, a darkly playful subversion of the vengeful uptight-old-lady stereotype established by Psycho.Pearl, then, is an origins story, which explains, with a darkly funny inevitability, how a naive soldier’s wife with