Reviewed by William Bibbiani
Ti West’s Pearl (2022) is an oddity amongst horror sequels and prequels. The fact of its existence is not the remarkable part. What’s actually extraordinary is that Pearl is more than just a fantastic prequel: it successfully illuminates and recontextualizes its predecessor, dramatically improving a film that was already acclaimed to begin with. Pearl is a prequel to West’s retro slasher X, which takes place in the 1970s and follows a group of independent filmmakers who rent a cabin on a farm from an elderly couple. Their mission is clandestine, to secretly film a pornographic movie starring Maxine Minx (Mia Goth, Emma) under the farmers’ noses. But when they’re not having spirited debates about sex-positivity, they’re getting murdered one-by-one by Pearl (also played by Goth), an old woman who longs for her sexual prime. [Read more…]