PEARL (B) - If Ti West were smart (and he seems to be), he'd just keep making movies with Mia Goth and see where her manic verve takes him. Her face can fill a screen, and just watch her channel-surf through emotions at the drop of an "Action!" Goth was a revelation earlier this year in the tongue-in-cheek horror romp "X," and here she flies solo in the title role of that movie's prequel, "Pearl."
Goth, in heavy makeup, played a second role in "X" as the homicidal old lady living on a farm where Goth's other character and a film crew chose to shoot a porn film circa 1980. This prequel rewinds six decades to cruel Pearl's youth, during the flu epidemic of 1918. A teen, she yearns to be a dancer in the movies, but she is stuck down on the farm with her masochistic German mother and catatonic father, while her husband fights in Europe.
Pearl likes to nip into town and sneak into the movie theater. She meets the projectionist, who shares with her his private stash of stag films, and Pearl is intrigued. (Her marriage seems loveless and/or arranged.) Those urges dovetail with her casual cruelty, which eventually graduates from farm animals to humans.
Still starstruck, she conspires with her pretty blond sister-in-law to try out for a chorus line. All of this unfolds rather lethargically, as West takes his time building to the inevitable bloodbaths that will stamp Pearl as seriously disturbed. If you're patient, though, you will be rewarded with a sly spoof of classic horror films that nonetheless honors the genre's roots.
None of this would work without Goth, who is absolutely committed to the insanity and emotional intensity of this abused woman from a bygone era. Late in the film she unleashes a raw, intense expiating monologue that must run five minutes long and seems to be a single take. It is mesmerizing. She has the ability to nimbly cycle through expressions -- suggesting a range of emotions -- and to do so while tiptoeing along the high wire between comedy and tragedy. If it's as if Shelley Duvall could really act. Once again, Goth is worth the price of a movie ticket.
Postscript: Here's an interesting phenomenon. My date and I were clearly well above the average age in the theater, which was overwhelmingly made up of Millennials and Homelanders. Besides being quite fidgety, they rarely laughed. Granted, this is not a belly-laugh movie, but it's slyly, drily, darkly funny. Did the younger people not get the retro kitchiness of a horror spoof? Were they too invested in the emotional turmoil to be able to allow for humor at the same time? Did they just not think it was funny? That's an analysis for another day.
GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY (B) - This one is a throwback not only to old-fashioned star-studded murder mysteries but also to a time when you could count on a sequel falling short of the original. It's a pretty entertaining movie; it's just not as special as "Knives Out," about which we described writer-director Rian Johnson as "pulling juicy performances from his enthusiastic players."
The original had a stronger cast and a sharper narrative structure. The original had Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, Toni Collette, Lakeith Stanfield and Ana DeArmas. Here we get the B team: Edward Norton, Kate Hudson, Jonelle Monae, Kathryn Hahn and Leslie Odom Jr. I've never seen Hahn so flat and uninspired, and Norton is a fine actor, but he doesn't have the shoulders to carry the film as yet another tech bro who has invited his old pals to his private island compound for a murder-mystery party. And Kate Hudson always looks, to me, like Kate Hudson playing a role; here, she is a dim-witted online influencer a bit past her prime.
In fact, each character seems to be an avatar for a societal ill begat from social media and tech culture. Thick-necked Dave Bautista (who?) is also a shallow online celebrity (pushing "men's rights") and Odom is a brainy scientist, while Hahn is a governor of questionable morality. Nobody here, including a mugging Daniel Craig reprising his role as famous Cajun detective Benoit Blanc, seems particularly connected with the material. It's as if Johnson stuffed a lot of ideas and plot tricks into his script (in particular a critical reset at the halfway mark) but failed to adequately translate it for his cast. A plot point involving a possibly ground-breaking new form of energy comes off as a kitschy ripoff of the old "Batman" TV show. (As for Craig's broad delivery of his fussy detective, I'd guess that Leslie Nielsen would have made a better James Bond than Craig makes a Frank Drebin.)
It's almost as if the Easter-egg cameo players had a lot more fun -- the scene with Serena Williams delivers one of the best gags in the film. (Another great joke involves Hudson's ditzy character misunderstanding the term "sweatshop.") Otherwise, staged during COVID, the movie fails to bridge gaps and bring everyone together on the same page. Monae grabs a lot of screen time as the scorned former business partner of Norton's billionaire, and she is skilled in a tricky role, but at times she comes off as trying too hard, her natural talent stifled.
Maybe Johnson had too big a budget and too much running time to play with, though even at 139 minutes, the movie zips along and is always entertaining. But when you trade Michael Shannon for a wrestler and Jamie Lee Curtis for Goldie Hawn's kid, you're not going to win a competitive match. It's all good fun, but it's missing the special spark of the 2019 original.
BONUS TRACK
The "Glass Onion" title track from the Beatles, which plays over the closing credits:
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