Pearl is a candy-coated piece of rotten fruit. The film, which is the predecessor of this year’s director Tio West x, trades the desaturated look and grunginess of its 1970s parent film for a macabre Douglas Sirk-inspired aesthetic that at first seems to exist at odds with its tale of intense violence and horror. But much like its main protagonist, whose youthful beauty and southern glow mask the monster within, there’s a poison lurking beneath. Pearlvivid colors and a seemingly unblemished Depression-era American setting.
The action takes place approximately 60 years ago x. Despite these differences, Pearl it still feels like a natural extension x. The latter film, with its use of split screens and well-placed needles, offered a surprisingly dark reflection on the horrors of old age. Pearlmeanwhile, it explores the loss of innocence and, specifically, the often terrifying truths that remain after one’s dreams have been unceremoniously ripped from them.
At the center of both films is a lonely, impulsive serial killer who Mia Goth has now played at the beginning and end of his life. IN xGoth’s duels as Pearl and Maxine shine in a series of memorable supporting roles from the film’s other stars. Pearl, on the contrary, puts Goth front and center in its story. In doing so, the film offers its star the opportunity to deliver one of the best and most vulnerable performances of the year so far.
Christopher Moss/A24
Pearl begins in 1918, a year when many Americans are still fighting overseas while those living at home are left to battle the horrors of the Spanish Flu. It’s a time that can make anyone a little crazy, making it the worst — or perfect, depending on how you look at it — environment for young Pearl (Goth) to grow up. When the film opens, Pearl is still living under the same stifling roof as her domineering mother, Ruth (Tandi Wright), who forces her to routinely bathe and feed her crippled father (Matthew Sunderland), while Pearl is left to pray nightly for her husband, Howard (Alistair Sewell). ), to return home safely from the war.
Her poor relationship with her mother, combined with her own terrible loneliness, made Pearl want to just go far, far away from the family farm. While she manages to banish the suffocating mood of her life by routinely escaping into her own fantasies, a sudden act of gleeful, nonchalant violence in the film’s opening minutes makes it clear that Goth’s would-be serial killer is already on the verge of total collapse. with time Pearl catch up with her. As a result, the film’s script, co-written by West and Goth, does not take on the same slasher film structure as x.
instead of that, Pearl it often feels like some kind of twisted coming-of-age story. In fact, like all great heroes in all great coming-of-age stories, Pearl goes on a journey of self-acceptance throughout the film. During PearlIn the 102-minute run, she is forced to let down her defenses and learn how to be vulnerable in front of others. The only problem is that the real Pearl, the one she hides beneath a smile that alternates between mischievous and menacing, has a habit of scaring those around her – and with good reason.
Christopher Moss/A24
Pearl’s descent into complete madness is contrasted quite effectively with the film’s glossy Technicolor look. The resulting effect is the one that does Pearl sometimes they look like a horror film by the French director Jacques Demy. The film sets are covered in bright pastel colors (the drainage pipe in the alley is noticeably painted pink in one memorable scene) in a way that even calls to mind a film like Umbrellas from Cherbourg, which still looks like it was designed to look as cute and adorable as possible. That’s what he said, the movie that Pearl has the most in common with is not Young girls from Rochefort or xbut Blue velvet.
Like that 1986 David Lynch classic, Pearl is interested in exploring the rot that lies beneath the surface of so many American archetypes. Pearl’s desperate desire to escape her hometown puts her in the same emotional space as practically every movie high school girl or Disney princess. But unlike many of cinema’s other wanderlust-driven young protagonists, Pearl doesn’t shine the longer she’s left out in the sun. Instead, she deteriorates, and so do her dreams, which start innocently enough before becoming increasingly violent and disturbing. The film, in turn, gradually replaces its pristinely painted red barns, golden scarecrows, and other bits of familiar American iconography with recurring images of rotting pigs and half-burned corpses.
Eventually, no matter how hard she tries to suppress it, Pearl’s growing instability cannot but surface. Once it happens, Pearl he begins to indulge more in the kind of blood-soaked horror and brutality that x fans may have expected all along. However, as influential as the violence is within PearlThe final third, Goth’s red, weeping performance takes center stage at the end.
Christopher Moss/A24
After opening with a wonderfully eerie prologue, Pearl it takes time to deliver the kind of violence and horror that his story itself promises. The movie is a slow burn in a way x much of it isn’t, making it far less superficially entertaining and watchable than West’s previous horror film. Its second act, and particularly the pace at which Pearl’s relationship with her mother develops, also drags at certain points, which occasionally dulls the film’s overwhelming sense of unease.
But every time it seems Pearl could get lost in the weeds of his own heightened vision of the past, Goth steps in and brings everything back into focus. The actress surpasses her work in x here, delivery performance as Pearlleadership that evokes both pity and fear, often at the same time. Her performance is so central Pearl, in fact, that the film essentially climaxes with a long monologue that takes place almost entirely in one continuous close-up of Goth’s mascara-stained face. The scene might be the best of Goth’s career to date, followed by an example of cold-blooded brutality that might be the most technically impressive sequence West has ever pulled off (you’ll know it when you see it).
Pearl | Official Trailer HD | A24
From there, Pearl it achieves a kind of operatic quality that mostly manages to justify the lengthy construction. Regardless of whether the film’s climax makes it as effective as the one from x will, however, likely vary depending on the tastes of its viewers. x made a lasting impression because of the way it pulled its tropes from the sources of various horror classics only to twist them in ways that were often surprising and darkly funny. Pearlon the other hand, it often draws inspiration from films and stories that are, at best, only tangentially related to the horror genre.
The resulting film is a sunny and vivid clip of horror in the color technique, which is both technically more impressive and more subtle than x. The film presents its horrors more nakedly than x it does, but it comes across in a sense of unease that’s far less visceral than its predecessor’s straight-up slasher-driven violence. Neither approach is more valid than the other, but it’s a testament to West’s control over his craft. Pearl manages to cast the spell it does, one that makes it impossible to look away even when the film’s corrupt truths are literally staring you in the face.
Pearl arrives in theaters on Friday, September 16.
Editor’s recommendations
Categories: GAMING
Source: newstars.edu.vn