Starring Mia Goth, David Coronswet, Tandi Wright, Matthw Sunderland, Emma Jenkins-Purro, Amelia Reid Meredith and Alistair Sewell

Written and directed by Ti West

Second Sight, out now

It’s 1918 and Pearl (Mia Goth) is living with her immigrant German parents on a Texan farm. Spanish flu is ravaging the world, her husband is away at the war, but all is well, because Pearl is going to be a star. By any means necessary.

Ti West’s prequel to X, filmed at the same time as X, is an extraordinary piece of storytelling and filmmaking. Conceived during Covid and written during the two weeks he was in quarantine before filming X, it uses the same set and the same crew to create a radically different movie.

Central to all of this is Goth, in what may be her best performance. Pearl is a Disney princess without a cute, animated sidekick. A talented, gifted young woman locked down under the brutal tenacity of her mother and the endless health needs of her father, she’s furious and can’t see it. Living inside her own delusions, she curdles the movie’s reality into a technicolour musical, complete with production numbers and sudden aspect and colour changes. From a cinematic point of view it’s a fluid, feverish waltz played a little too fast. From a horror point of view, it’s a movie that locks us into Pearl’s arms and dances us into hell with her, even as she explains why she’s going.

The collision between Pearl’s reality and the movie’s gives West and his star (and functional co-writer according to the excellent extras) a chance to make some wild swings and they all land. Pearl’s journey out into a wider world is enabled by pre-Superman David Coronswet as a cheerfully sleazy projectionist and Emma Jenkins-Perro as Mitsy, her sister-in-law. Both try and steer her, both pay the price and both watch through no one’s fault, as every door Pearl goes through slams in her face. That leads to a stunning third act anchored by two scenes. One is a five-page monologue Pearl delivers in close up, as it becomes apparent just how dangerous she is. The other is a tracking shot that begins with her last victim walking out of the house and ends with Pearl, with a blood-covered axe in her hand. Goth is staggeringly great here especially, and she and Jenkins-Purro do stunning work as two women trapped by circumstance and doomed by choices often not their own.

Verdict: Bloody, maniacal, beautiful and tragic Pearl is West’s best movie to date by some distance. It cements Goth’s status as a modern Queen of horror and it sets up and enriches both X and Maxxxine. 10/10

Alasdair Stuart