When Pearl bowed at last year's Venice Film Festival, the reviews were ecstatic. “Terrifically accomplished and horribly gripping,” exclaimed The Guardian in its five-star review. “A handsome and sad horror drama, with scenes and shots and performances that will make you wonder if you're supposed to laugh, cry or shriek,” gasped The Wrap. “An engrossing study in strangeness… emotional… [a] riveting portrait of insanity,” cried Screen Daily. And Total Film? “Clever, violent and wicked… real cinematic flourishes… fabulously unhinged,” was the breathless opinion of your most trusted magazine.
But best of all was the review of a certain Martin Scorsese, who was so shaken and stirred by this modest horror movie made in New Zealand during the pandemic, he felt the need to take pause from being The World's Greatest Living Director to moonlight as a critic. “Pearl makes for a wild, mesmerising, deeply - and I mean deeply - disturbing 102 minutes,” he wrote in a review sent to production company A24. “West and his muse and creative partner Mia Goth really know how to toy with their audience… before they plunge the knife into our chests and start twisting. I was enthralled, then disturbed, then so unsettled that I had trouble getting to sleep. But I couldn't stop watching.”
Four months later, over Zoom, writer-director Ti West and his star and co-writer Goth
