Pearl (2022)

Ti West's Pearl arrives dressed as a Technicolor melodrama and departs as something far less wholesome. Mia Goth plays the title character, a farm girl in 1918 Texas who tends a paralyzed father, endures a devout mother, and dreams of the chorus line. The Spanish flu keeps the family isolated. A war keeps the husband away. None of this is deployed as commentary. The pandemic is a device for confinement, not a sermon on public health. The tension inside the household is German and ethnic, not racial, and the film has no interest in drawing lessons from it.

There is a faint pulse of something like feminist grievance. Pearl rages against domestic servitude, and the audition scene delivers a rejection on grounds of not being young, blonde, or all-American. It is a sharp observation about the narrow shelf life granted to women in 1918. But the film is a villain origin story, and it treats Pearl's fury as pathology, not thesis. Her violence is psychopathy and repressed rage. Nobody is advocating for her. Nobody is diagnosing her either, which spares us a lecture on neurodivergence.

The rest of the ledger is quiet. The cast is white and the film makes no apology or correction for it. Hollywood stardom is a seductive fantasy here, not an economic indictment. There are no queer currents, no body-positive messaging, no climate anxiety, no reworking of the historical record. We get instead a stylized character study that shows its horrors and declines to explain them. It is a film about a woman with an axe and a smile, and it trusts us to be disturbed without being told how. Refreshing, in its grim way.