Earlier this year, Ti West released the 1970s slasher movie X, his first feature film in six years. A product of the renowned indie film studio A24, X used to be a critical success, and now fans can look forward to the prequel. Ti West’s Secret Project, Pearl, was shot immediately afterwards X packaged, and serves as the origin story for the first film’s titular villain.
Mia Goth, who played the dual roles of last girl Maxine and elderly Pearl in X, will reprise her role as the latter and take center stage once again. A new trailer for the movie teases sex, murder and betrayal – just like X – and fans can’t wait to see how it compares. Fortunately, they don’t have to wait long. Of Pearl‘s release on the horizon, here’s a look at what else you can expect from the slasher, which seems to be as X-citing as its inspiration.
X follows a group of adult filmmakers who travel to rural Texas in the late 1970s to shoot a film. While residing in an old farmhouse, they try to keep their project a secret, but the elderly hosts Pearl and Howard (Stephen Ure) catch them in the act and kill them one by one. Pearl, meanwhile, takes place several decades earlier, in 1918. The film shows Pearl living with her parents in the same house where the massacre of X eventually takes place.
As the trailer shows, Pearl’s father is sick and her devoted mother is cruel. All she wants is to leave the farm and “be special, dance on the screen like the pretty girls in the pictures.” She is so desperate to make this dream come true that she is even willing to kill for it, as she has shown that she is considering feeding her father to the crocodiles and wielding a pitchfork. In many ways Pearl is not that different from Maxine. West acknowledges this and told Fangoria:
I love that with Pearl’s character, Mia was able to create a villain that wouldn’t be a normal villain, and I love how she gave this character some humanity to her, and that’s what that movie is [Pearl] hangs.
Obviously, the film will showcase Pearl’s origins, but fans will have to wait and see exactly what twists and turns Pearl has in store.
Leading lady Mia Goth is no stranger to the horror genre. Except for XGoth previously starred in Gore Verbinski’s A cure for wellness and Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria redo. Her performance in the latter received critical acclaim and the film itself won the Robert Alman Prize at the Independent Spirit Awards.
Join Gothic Pearl his actors David Corenswet (the politician, Hollywood), Tandi Wright (nothing trivial, The Returnees), Matthew Sunderland (Out of nowhere, the nightingale)and Emma Jenkins-Purro (The Brokenwood Mysteries, times gone by). They all have unspecified roles, but the trailer reveals that Wright and Sunderland will play Pearl’s mother and father, respectively, and Jenkins-Purro her league. Given the strong performances in the history of all the actors, there is good hope that this film will not disappoint.
Ti West wrote and directed Pearl with Goth assisting as co-writer. West told several sources that in the months leading up to filming Xhe and Goth . developed Pearl together via FaceTime, not knowing if it was going anywhere. Luckily, A24 – who will co-produce? Pearl with Little Lamb Productions – gave the project the thumbs up, and quarantine made it possible. Ti West is known for its low-budget horror films, including: The Devil’s House and the innkeepers. His last movie before X was the western thriller In a valley of violenceand is an outlier in its filmography.
Tyler Bates and Timothy Williams provide the music for Pearl, with Elliot Rockett returning as cameraman. Despite the returning crew, the audience can count on Pearl to look very different X. As West told Damn disgusting:
“In the way that X influenced, say, by the 1970s horror movies and Americana cinema, Pearl is influenced by a very different era of filmmaking.”
Elsewhere, West Douglas cites Sirk melodramas as a source of inspiration. Sirk was a German-American director and a fixture in Old Hollywood, which was most popular in the 1950s.
Pearl will have its world premiere at the 79th Venice International Film Festival in September 2022 and will hit theaters on September 16. There are only six months between X and Pearl, and it may come as a surprise that West is already thinking about a third film to add to the construction saga. as he told IndieWire in a recent interview:
“I’m trying to build a world out of all of this, like people do these days… You can’t make a slasher movie without a lot of sequels.”
Mia Goth also has another project in the pipeline, the sci-fi thriller Infinity pool. Written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg, infinity pool follows wealthy couple James (Alexander Skarsgård) and Em Foster (Goth) vacationing on the fictional island of La Tolqa, where they encounter the hedonistic subculture and surreal horrors that underlie their opulent seaside town. Little else is known about the film, so stay tuned for updates.
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