At peak powers, indie horror auteur Ti West excels at the slow burn. In his 2009 breakout The House of the Devil — still probably his high-water mark — the filmmaker accumulated satisfyingly textured 1980s period details and microscopic sensory elements until tensions were ready to burst, finally reaching a denouement of bloodshed and Satanism. West’s subsequent decade-plus saw him struggling to put together a worthy follow-up, though his not dismissible craft was still visible here and there. With this spring’s X, West finally delivered on the promise of Devil, imbuing an ode to 1970s slasher films and pornography with a sense of pacing that was unmistakably its director’s; near-alienating, X admirably took its sweet time before it began offing its ragtag group of lead characters and employed several impressively sustained takes to both lull viewers into false contentment and agitate nerves.
The finest moments of Pearl, a prequel filmed back-to-back with X in secret, are also marked by formal patience and lingering shots that revel in curdling emotion — a slain pig engulfed by maggots, a final view of its lead character’s face that’s best to leave to your own discovery. But unfortunately, Pearl doesn’t demonstrate the same ability to dramatically withhold and then suddenly gratify with moments of cathartic violence or sex at which West has proven himself adept in the past. Before even the film’s title card is displayed, we are shown that the titular farm girl (Mia Goth) is prone to harming or disposing of animals for no reason around her uptight German mother Ruth (Tandi Wright) and handicapped father’s (Matthew Sunderland) Texas residence, the subtly named Powder Keg Farms. Thus, when the time comes for the ostensibly repressed Pearl to realize her full potential as a vicious killer, it’s tough to be surprised and the prevailing mood is slack and oddly diffuse rather than intense and chill-inducing.
The movie, which West also edited and co-scripted with Goth, is set in 1918, about six decades prior to the events of X, and traces the journey of the earlier film’s aged, sexually restless Southern belle coming into her own, or, more accurately, how she’s prevented from doing so and retaliates brutally. Like with X, the proceedings are almost entirely contained to the plot of land on which Pearl’s family lives. The films also share an attempt by West to connect the characters’ family histories to the current events of their day — in X, Maxine (also played by Goth) was, it turned out, the daughter of the televangelist preacher being broadcast into Pearl and husband Howard’s living room on their 10-inch TV set. This development was one of the more needless and overly engineered elements of that movie, and Pearl’s parallels with World War I—in which Howard is off serving for the film’s duration—and its underlining of the fact that the girl’s family’s heritage is unwelcome in the U.S. during the contemporary period doesn’t add much.
More damning is the movie’s employment of the 1918 influenza pandemic as a cheap echo of our ongoing battles with COVID-19. A character at one point proclaims, “It’s hard to know who anyone is these days with all these masks people are wearing” and another bemoans that “All this isolation has been enough to make one mad.” West and Goth stoke our recognition of the situation for easy identification but do little else with the modern-day resonances and it feels like a missed opportunity for some kind of twisted, nightmarish expression of the fear of sickness. If you’re going to invoke the pandemic, go all-out and don’t be corny. Characters like Pearl’s mother and mother-in-law are both characterized as hygiene-obsessed, but that’s about as far as it goes.
Something about the world Pearl presents and the yarn it fashions just isn’t as delicious or compelling as in X. This film also contains nods to cinephilia and to porn, but a voyeuristic need to watch and observe peoples’ behaviors isn’t as deeply ingrained in the characters here as it was in the first installment. Despite this, Pearl does include one fantastically unsettling sequence of its lead’s father, who is paralyzed, sitting by the tub as Pearl undresses and bathes, looking on with a desperate, lecherous kind of pleasure. Goth is once again tremendous, even if her character this time is a bit more thinly sketched. She has one late-in-film monologue, unfolding over the course of a single take, where she captures a delusional mind coming unhinged, still convinced of her own justifications, with a deranged commitment.
Pearl is a neat experiment and one can admire West and company’s interest in expanding the world of their film, which comes off less like an Extended Cinematic Universe 
cash grab and mostly just an extension of an earnest passion for realizing a vision to its fullest. But the film is more lifeless than it should be and, absent the aesthetic reference points that projects like House of the Devil and X draw from, West’s filmmaking feels wayward. He makes feeble gestures toward Classic Hollywood (a couple of decades too early) with a script-y credits font and a slightly heightened tone to the dialogue. But on the whole, his latest is anticlimactic and in search of a real hook outside of its relationship to its superior predecessor.
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