Pearl (2022) is Ti West's Technicolor prequel to his slasher X, and it does something rare for horror prequels: it makes the villain more frightening by making her sympathetic. Shot in the same year as X on the same Texas ranch, Pearl strips away the grime of its predecessor and replaces it with saturated primary colours, sweeping orchestral music, and the visual grammar of a 1940s Douglas Sirk melodrama. It's a stylistic gamble that pays off completely, because it puts Mia Goth at the centre of the frame with nowhere to hide. She doesn't hide. She burns.
What Pearl is actually about
The film is set in 1918, on a remote Texas farm during the Spanish flu pandemic. Pearl is a young woman trapped under the thumb of her stern German immigrant mother (Tandi Wright) and burdened with caring for her paralysed father. Her husband is overseas at war. Her only outlets are the barn animals she tends with disturbing tenderness and the movie theatre in town, where a projectionist named Mitsy (David Corenswet) feeds her fantasies of becoming a showgirl. Pearl wants out. She wants to be seen. That desire, denied long enough, cracks into something savage.
Ti West and Goth co-wrote the script together during production of X, and the seams between collaboration and performance are invisible. Every scene feels designed around Goth's ability to hold contradictions: Pearl is delusional and self-aware, tender and brutal, pathetic and terrifying. The film earns every pivot because West commits fully to the melodrama's logic. The horror doesn't intrude from outside, it grows inside the genre itself, like rot inside a bright red apple.
Mia Goth's performance
There's a monologue near the end of Pearl that runs nearly six unbroken minutes. Pearl sits across a dinner table and confesses the full architecture of her interior life to her sister-in-law Mitsy. Goth delivers it in a single take, cycling through grief, rage, self-pity and something close to relief, all while holding a smile that keeps shifting its meaning. It's one of the finest pieces of screen acting in a horror film since Toni Collette's breakdown in Hereditary (2018). The Academy did not nominate Goth, which is the kind of institutional failure horror audiences have come to expect.
What makes the performance work beyond that scene is the physical precision. Goth plays Pearl's instability through small movements: the way her eyes go flat in a moment of violence, the way she laughs too long, the way she holds her body very still when she's working something out. It's a performance that pays off every scene before it and recontextualises every scene in X at the same time.
How West uses colour and genre as horror tools
West and cinematographer Eliot Rockett light Pearl like a film stock dream. The farmhouse is perpetually golden. Pearl's dresses are vivid blues and reds. The sky looks painted. This isn't nostalgia for its own sake. The visual beauty creates a gap between what the film looks like and what's actually happening in it, and that gap is where the dread lives. When violence arrives in a world this lush and cheerful, it lands harder than it would in a conventionally grey horror palette.
The tonal control recalls the specific queasy discomfort of Midsommar (2019), another horror film that weaponises brightness and beauty. West is doing something different though. Ari Aster used sunlight to make folk horror feel inescapable. West uses his Technicolor world to tell the story of a woman who loved something, a dream, an idea of herself, and destroyed everything around her when that love went unanswered.
Where the film stumbles
The middle third sags. The scenes between Pearl and the projectionist circle the same emotional territory without advancing it, and Corenswet's character is thin enough that their dynamic never quite convinces. It's 20 minutes the film could trim without losing any of its argument. The mother, too, is written as a function rather than a character: she's an obstacle and a symbol rather than a person, which limits the family dynamics to a single note of suffocation.
These are real weaknesses. They don't sink the film, partly because Goth's performance is magnetic enough to carry scenes that aren't fully written, and partly because the final act is so confidently executed that it redeems most of what came before it.
The verdict
Pearl is a horror film that trusts its genre's tools completely. It uses melodrama to make tragedy, uses beauty to intensify violence, and uses a single performance to anchor a character study that's also a monster movie. Ti West has now made three films in the X universe (the third, MaXXXine, arrived in 2024), but Pearl is the sharpest of the set. It's the one that asks why someone becomes the thing that horror films usually treat as given.
Mia Goth's final shot, a grin held long past the point of comfort, is the image the film earns with every scene before it. Pearl is available to stream on Prime Video. Watch it before X if you want the emotional gut-punch. Watch it after if you want the biographical dread.