REVIEW:
Pearl is an okay movie. It’s pretty much exactly what you’d expect, if you know what genre the movie is playing in. This is the story of a woman who becomes a serial killer. She starts out as an abused individual living on a farm with her sick and dying father, and her cruel mother. But Pearl isn’t so innocent from the very beginning. Right away, she kills a bird with a pitch fork and feeds the dead body to a crocodile.
The movie goes on to show Pearl and the other characters in her life. One is a young man (played by Superman’s David Cornswet,) who works at a movie theater as a projectionist. While it seems like Pearl is nice and sweet in her interactions with him, pretty soon we realize that she is insane, as she takes him to her house, tells her these plans she has of him taking her away from here, and then kills him when he gets scared off.
This is just the start of the killings. It gets worse and worse, and Pearl gets more and more scary. By the end of the movie, we get an audition sequence that is pretty compelling, starting with Pearl’s fantasy that she just has to get the role. When she doesn’t, she takes it out on all the wrong people. What works in this movie are the quiet moments where you know something awful is about to happen. Like a scene towards the end where Pearl pours her heart out to a nice woman who wants to hear her story and listen. We sit there thinking, why is Pearl telling her all this, confessing all of these things she has done, and we realize there is no way Pearl will be letting this woman leave alive. It’s that kind of movie. It does deliver and it is scary, in exactly the ways you would hope for. In the realm of pure scariness, this movie succeeds. In the realm of creative plot, this one keeps things pretty simple. It doesn’t feel like something all that fresh, but it does break down the basics of what would lead someone to snap and go off the deep end, pretty nicely.