By the time Pearl auditions for a traveling dance troupe in Pearl (2022), she’s counting on a place in the show to give her a future she can still bear to imagine. She’s already killed people close to her. Becoming a star lets her believe there’s something waiting beyond the farm and the violence.
Ti West’s prequel to X places Pearl, played by Mia Goth, on a Texas farm in 1918, during World War I and the Spanish flu. Her husband, Howard, is away at war.
At home, her strict mother, Ruth, controls her life, and her paralyzed father needs care. Movies offer Pearl a glimpse of the life she wants.
When her sister-in-law Mitsy tells her about the audition, Pearl invests everything in it. Before she gets there, a fight with Ruth leaves her mother badly burned, and Pearl shuts her in the basement. She kills a projectionist she’s slept with when he tries to leave, then smothers her father.
The audition gives that destruction a destination. Pearl can imagine herself leaving, being admired, becoming someone whose life matters.
That makes the judges’ decision devastating: they want a younger, blonde performer who fits their idea of an “all-American” girl. Her commitment to the performance can’t change what they’re looking for.
Pearl has treated her own exceptional talent as a certainty. The rejection leaves her facing the possibility that the escape she’s built her life around will never happen. Her fantasy of a future onstage collapses while the consequences of her killings remain.
Back at the farm, she confesses to Mitsy about her loneliness, her resentment toward Howard, and the people she’s killed. Then Mitsy admits she’s been chosen for the troupe. Someone close to Pearl has been offered the future Pearl wanted, and Pearl chases her down with an axe and gets her.
When Howard finally comes home, Pearl is back at the farm, waiting for him with her parents’ bodies arranged at the table.
