Sixteen Further Screams For Halloween: Day 13 (Pearl)

It's been a strange road which has led me here to this motion picture, and it's all thanks to Scream. TO make a long story short, last year the two stars of the recent Scream pictures getting shitcanned because one said pro-Palestine things and the other protested her costar getting shitcanned. That led to me swearing off new Scream, but also doing a duo of films each starring those girls as my tribute in solidarity. Those films were Abigail with Melissa Barrera, and X with Jenna Ortega. Ignoring for the moment that X wasn't the best Ortega tribute because A) She's a supporting character and B) she doesn't make it through the film, it nevertheless remained a pretty good motion picture. I had a bunch to say about old age, sex, and the notion of sexhavers in horror movies when I covered it. What I didn't know then was that this was only half the story. That movie has a companion piece, which is what we're covering here today. I only had the vaguest memories of X, given that it was literally a year ago when I watched it. I recognized some of the geography from the prior movie, but went in with only the notion of "Mia Goth, who was in X, is now playing a young version of that creepy old bitch who killed everyone in X". I was not ready for what was about to transpire.

Pearl is an absolutely sicknasty motion picture straddled over a dangerous line, and one the film places you between before the opening credits are even done. One foot is lodged in a world of empathy, Pearl being a wide-eyed idealist with dreams of making it big as a dancer in Hollywood. Dreamy Disney princess, or given that she's a farm girl who encounters a scarecrow later, a Dorothy Gale for the modern age. Then the other foot reveals itself when she kills a goose with a pitchfork and feeds it to an alligator. Pearl carries a darkness within her, a short fuse and a screw loose that results in something being deeply fucking wrong with her. We remain stuck between these two worlds for the rest of the movie, trapped in a limbo of elevated horror. Yes, there are grisly murders that occur, but the movie is about so much more than that. It's about Pearl herself, and the way in which being trapped along with her in this movie rounds her out to be something frightening, compelling, horrific, and tragic.

When paired with knowledge of X, it's equally terrifying and tragic. For all her idealist dreams of making it big, we know that she will not escape this dingy old farm. She will still be here, 60 years later, lamenting what time has robbed from her and taking it out on a bunch of sexhavers, especially the one that looks just like she did in 1918. In a sheer eerie coincidence, here's what I had to say about Pearl's mirror Maxine when I did X last year:

The way the climax plays out feels to me like divine intervention did save Maxine, despite every puritanical trope trying to scream otherwise. She's a porn star, a cocaine fiend, and a sexhaver. Surely she must die, but no. She persists, because she is determined to be a star. Sheer grit and defiance gets her through at the end, and that's really something.

That second to last line. She persists because she's determined to be a star. That exact force is what drives Pearl in this movie... except where Maxine made it out alive (and maybe even made her form of stardom, MaXXXine is a film for next year), Pearl failed to escape the gravity trapping her at the farm. She sacrificed so much, killed everything that got in her way, and failed her audition. Even killing her sister-in-law who got the part doesn't fix it. And so, at the very end... That grin. I haven't seen such a tour de force acting job using only a smile since Sheryl Lee in the Twin Peaks movie. What is Mia Goth expressing with that tortured grin? Is she trying to keep the darkness suppressed? Is she trying to play happy while hiding the pain and sorrow of her failure and loss? Whatever she's doing, it's damn compelling. It's a fine motion picture, is what I'm saying, and that's where I'll leave it. Next year we get to see even more of it, but for now we understand Pearl. We may still condemn her, we may even pity her... but we understand her.