I’ve already written about Ti West’s “Pearl”, even including it in my TIFF ten best list, but it pleases me to to learn that none other than Martin Scorsese is also a big fan.
Scorsese loved it so much that he went out of his way to pen a letter to A24 in which he gushes about the Mia Goth-starring film:
"Ti West's movies have a kind of energy that is so rare these days, powered by a pure, undiluted love for cinema. You feel it in every frame. A prequel to 'X' made in a diametrically opposite cinematic register (think 50s Scope color melodramas), 'Pearl' makes for a wild, mesmerizing, deeply — and I mean deeply — disturbing 102 minutes. West and his muse and creative partner Mia Goth really know how to toy with their audience ... before they plunge the knife into our chests and start twisting. I was enthralled, then disturbed, then so unsettled that I had trouble getting to sleep. But I couldn't stop watching."
It’s quite simply the best movie currently playing in theaters. A cinematic bonbon filled with mirth and malice. It’s also richly cinematic in its camera movements, photography and, really, just the entire mise-en-scene.
Set during the 1918 pandemic, with plenty of townspeople wearing face masks, “Pearl” builds and fully fleshes out its anti-heroine (played by a deliciously twisted Mia Goth). She’s trapped on her mother’s isolated farm, lusting for the glamorous life she sees at the movies. We all figure that, sooner or later, she’ll probably snap. And, that she does.
Here’s filmmaker Ti West, buzzing from having already released “X” this year, with a superior prequel to that horror movie. “Pearl” can be very comedic at times in its full-blown acceptance of the crazed titular character’s naïveté. The film is shot with the kind of beautiful photography that recalls 1950s technicolor. The colors pop in this dark and twisted tale.
If you don’t know where to start with Ti West’s filmography, I highly recommend that you watch 2016’s “In a Valley of Violence,” a truly underrated and grisly western starring, of all people, John Travolta and Ethan Hawke.
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