Acting Gem
American Gothic: Mia Goth in Pearl. Photo: UPI Media
Jamie Lee Curtis’s recent Oscar victory shout-out to the genre fans who’ve supported her over the years was a reminder that great work is being done all the time in movies that rarely register on the radars of awards voters. Horror films especially — frequently celebrated as the perfect medium for filmmakers with visionary ideas and minimal resources — seldom get the props they deserve for showcasing great acting.
They should, of course. In Halloween, Curtis’s own ability to root her performance as Laurie Strode in the trauma of being first a suburban teenage girl, then a survivor of unstoppable male rage — neither state unrelated — sustained her involvement in the series across 45 years and six movies, the varying quality of which couldn’t dim how perceptively she understood that character from the get-go, nor how much she’s meant to audiences of all stripes who see in Laurie a reflection of their own pain.
Anyone seeking another destined-to-be-iconic horror movie acting tour de force should immediately check out Mia Goth in Ti West’s brilliantly bonkers new film Pearl, his prequel to last year’s 1970s-set slasher film X. In that film Goth demonstrated her versatility by playing both its damaged porn star heroine, Maxine, and its randy geriatric villain, Pearl. Reprising the latter role, she delivers one of the most demented and deeply felt performances of recent years in a movie that’s less a French New Wave-inspired homage to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (as X was), more a Wizard of Oz-inflected cinematic bildungsroman about the ways in which patriarchal and matriarchal oppression can manifest themselves in murderous psychosis and, just for yuks, carnal knowledge with a scarecrow.
Pearl: “A Wizard of Oz-inflected cinematic bildungsroman.” Photo: UPI Media
One of the smart things about X’s focus on Maxine, though, was it allowed Goth to subvert the virginal final girl trope that Curtis helped establish with Halloween. An escapee from a temperance-promoting religious sect, Maxine’s illusory freedom as a liberated woman of the 70s is undermined by the sheer amount of coke she has to snort to convince herself that playing a naive farm girl in a gonzo porn film will bring her the stardom and better life she craves. But Goth’s dual turn as her own nemesis Pearl was altogether stranger. Caked in layers of freaky prosthetics, Goth was practically unrecognisable as the sexually omnivorous octogenarian who violently disrupts the film production taking place on her and her husband’s dilapidated Texas farm — though not before crawling into bed with a sleeping Maxine, her own yearning awakened by all that naked flesh grinding away in her barn.
In the new film, which Goth co-wrote with West, she crafts a suitably deranged, yet psychologically astute, backstory for Pearl, playing her as a young woman living on that same Texas farm some 60 years earlier. The year is 1918, and while Pearl’s husband is off fighting in Europe, her already limited freedoms are being further curtailed by her strict German immigrant mother, her infirm father and the Spanish flu pandemic that’s raging through the country. Silent movies are Pearl’s only escape and, masked up in the local picture palace, she fantasises about breaking into the still-nascent industry. But an encounter with a local projectionist also opens her eyes to a more illicit form of moviemaking and when suppressed erotic desire meets the puritan zealotry and domestic obligations of the homesteader life she’s expected to embrace, grisly violence erupts (and how!).
Shot like a Douglas Sirk movie by way of Grant Wood’s American Gothic, the film is stylistically distinct from its grindhouse predecessor and Goth plays Pearl accordingly, making the most of its melodramatic flourishes to create a complex origins story for the monster her character will become. Yet even as Pearl is honing her killer instincts — first with poultry, then with people — Goth’s portrayal of her as a wide-eyed dreamer trying and failing to maintain the mask of normality forced upon her by a world that she (and we) can see isn’t right makes her oddly sympathetic. It all builds to an astonishing moment of acting bravado in the film’s final moments, one that West lets spill over into the end credits with a prolonged hold on Goth’s face, its features spasming as Pearl psychologically disassembles before our eyes, like a malfunctioning automaton unable to alight on the correct expression.
And the best news? West and Goth are already at work on a third instalment.