Pearl (2022) Review
This was a highly well made, if slightly relentless, horror movie. One thing that stood out from it as it began was the way its 60s technicolor aesthetic is pulled off. I feel Both 2021’s West Side Story and Last Night in Soho have shown that classic movies can still be done when you have a strong enough premise. Though what really gave it an identity of its own was the way it managed to ease into the traditional horror aspects the same way Dr. Sleep did, albeit with one discernible difference: it used psychological/melodramatic horror instead of torture porn (at least for enough of a part to avoid being labelled as such) to help us delve into that horror. Granted that the same melodrama becomes almost as effective a horror in itself as torture porn if it’s grim yet inspired reality manages to relate hard enough. But once that’s out of the way then even the most brutal scenes escalate into over-the-top enough lengths to become a comedy. Almost as if Quentin Tarantino was asked to make a Psycho origin story and have Norman Bates flat out switch gender (rather than stop at cross-dressing), especially when it even pays homage to a scene or two. Plus I’m not saying anything new but Miss Goth deserves at least ten awards for her commitment. Overall and all it was, if nothing else, a breath of fresh air to finally see a movie directed by Ti West after knowing his work for more than a decade.