Martin Scorsese made headlines recently with a review of Ti West’s Pearl that he sent to the studio responsible, A24, and was subsequently published on /Film, in which he praised the film as “a wild, mesmerizing, deeply – and I mean deeply – disturbing 102 minutes” that left him “so unsettled that I had trouble getting to sleep.” A prequel to West’s other 2022 horror gem, X, Pearl fills in the backstory of its eponymous slasher long before her sex life dried up and her bloodlust intensified. As both a perfect companion piece to X and a truly unnerving horror film in its own right, Pearl is a perfect prequel.

As with any franchise expansion, Pearl plays on the audience’s familiarity with the original movie. It continues X’s exploration of the adult film industry as a charismatic young cinema projectionist shows Pearl one of the first pornos ever made, A Free Ride, in an attempt to seduce her. Pearl also brings back the farm’s creepy basement full of dark secrets. In X, this basement contained a captive Lorraine and a beaten and bloodied sex slave; in Pearl, it’s where Pearl hides the bodies of everyone she murders, including her own parents. X fans also get to see the return of Theda, the ravenous alligator that Pearl feeds her victims to. But the prequel doesn’t use those familiar elements as a crutch. Viewers who haven’t seen X will still get plenty out of Pearl. The porno, the basement, and the alligator aren’t just a nod and a wink to X fans; they all serve the story at hand. The porno represents Pearl coming out of her shell and embracing her most sinful desires, the corpses piling up in the basement symbolize the guilt weighing on Pearl’s conscience, and the alligator – named after a famous movie star – rounds out this portrait of a wannabe performer stuck on a farm in the middle of nowhere.

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The best prequels use the inevitability of fate as a dramatic tool. When a character’s future is predetermined, storytellers can have fun taking their past in unexpected directions. The adorable nine-year-old podracer in The Phantom Menace is destined to become Darth Vader. The plucky young attorney in Better Call Saul is destined to represent the most notorious drug lord in New Mexico. The ambitious Italian immigrant in the flashback portions of The Godfather Part II is destined to become a fearsome mafia boss. And the starry-eyed farmhand in Pearl is destined to become a sexually repressed serial killer. Pearl spends the movie longing to leave the farm behind and become a star, but viewers of X know that her dreams will never come true and she’ll end up spending her entire life on that farm. This brings a tragic angle to a character with precious few redeeming qualities.

Mia Goth kissing a scarecrow in Pearl

Pearl works as much more than just an extension of X; it’s also a standout horror film in its own right with its own style and story structure that doesn’t rely on X to be enjoyable. Without knowing the endgame of X, audiences can still watch Pearl as a sinister character study of a farmhand with overbearing parents and a husband at war who snaps and becomes a cold-blooded murderer. Cinematographer Eliot Rockett captured some unforgettable shots for Pearl, from an ominous oner tracking a fleeing sister-in-law from the porch out onto the road as Pearl calmly picks up an axe and follows her to the sustained final close-up of Pearl smiling at her husband Howard when he returns from the frontlines to find an even more shocking sight at the dinner table than anything he saw in any warzone.

The entries of most franchises, from Star Wars to the Marvel Cinematic Universe to fellow horror series like Halloween, are all cut from the same tonal cloth. But Pearl isn’t just X 2.0; it has a cinematic language of its own, evoking the Golden Age of Hollywood with bright colors, catchy melodies, and a romanticized view of stardom. X has been described as Boogie Nights meets The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. It’s a gruesome ‘70s-set, ‘70s-style slasher about a sexually frustrated elderly couple killing off the cast and crew of a porno being shot on their property. Pearl doesn’t just rehash X’s unique sensibility. The prequel develops a sensibility of its own that’s just as horrifying, if not more so. West gave Pearl an old-fashioned filmmaking style with classical opening title design, dynamic scene transitions, and a whimsical musical score juxtaposed against the horrors on-screen.

Mia Goth smiling at the end of Pearl

Like all great prequels, Pearl enriches the original work. Just as Breaking Bad is even more compelling with the context provided in Better Call Saul, X is even more compelling with the context provided in Pearl. Fans can go back and rewatch X with a deeper understanding of Pearl’s psychology, and audiences who haven’t seen X can watch Pearl first and sympathize with the titular killer by seeing where her murderous motivations came from before witnessing her darkest massacre in her twilight years in X.

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