Filmed at the same time as X, Pearl is set in 1918 during World War I and the Spanish Flu and sees Goth reprising her role as Pearl. This time, the character is a young bride who lives on the farm with her parents and dreams of escaping to become a famous dancer even as her husband fights in the war.

Goth’s performance in the trilogy is completely fearless. In Xnot only was she playing two different roles, but one of them was a woman around 80 years old, which required the actor to spend hours in the makeup chair and calibrate her body and voice to those of ‘a much older woman. But it is in Pearl that his talent is truly released. Goth co-wrote the script with West, and she puts every fiber of her being into the performance, culminating in that unforgettable final shot.

Pearl’s mental state deteriorates throughout the film. Whether it’s sexually assaulting a scarecrow or feeding a severed head to a crocodile, she explores her psychosis in a truly original way while respecting the usual order of things by dismembering bodies and hallucinating her ascension towards dancing stardom. She bristles under the oppressive gaze of her strict German mother and under the pressure of caring for her invalid father. As she descends into madness, she kills both her parents and keeps the bodies.

Shot to look like a 1950s Technicolor melodrama, the film and Pearl’s trajectory might be campy and broad, but it’s Goth’s performance and a monologue she delivers to her sister-in-law Mitzy that brings it back down to earth and alludes to tragedy. of his loosening grip on reality. “It seems like there’s something missing in me that the rest of the world has,” she said shortly before stabbing the woman to death.

At the end of the film, Pearl’s husband, Howard, returns from the war. Walking up the driveway to the front door, the house seems empty. When he enters the kitchen, he stops in his tracks. A moldy, maggot-infested feast is placed on the table and the corpses of Pearl’s parents sit around it. When he turns around, he sees Pearl standing behind him in overalls and pigtails, holding a pitcher of lemonade. “Howard?” she says, “I’m so glad you’re home.” And then she smiles. And smiles. And smiles. As the seconds pass, the smile transforms. Frighteningly sunny at first, it wavers. The muscles in his face tighten as if to force the smile to stay in place. His features tremble, his eyes become watery and tears begin to flow. Yet the smile sticks as she spreads her lips over her teeth in a grimace and then a silent cry.

This is the defining moment of the film, one that contains both Pearl’s terrifying psychosis and the fear she confided to her sister-in-law. It is garish, sinister and tragic. Like Norman Bates’ chilling smile at the end of Psychologyit hints at something unknowable, an emotional state that no amount of empathy could resonate.

In an interview for MaXXXine in 2024 on the podcast Kermode and Mayo’s point of viewWest explained to film critic Mark Kermode how this unscripted shot came together.

Behind the smile scene in “Pearl”

According to the director, he had planned to make the smile a freeze frame. “I wanted her to smile, and then I would freeze the frame, and it would sort of match the opening freeze frame of the film (in which Pearl happily tosses a goose she has just killed to the crocodile) ” he said. explain. But he wasn’t sure exactly what he wanted to capture in his smile, so he told Goth, “I’m going to let this last a little longer because it might be, like, a freeze frame at the moment you smile, or I I might just want to wait a bit to see when is the right time to freeze it.

He said he only expected to let the camera roll for an extra ten seconds, recognizing that keeping a smile on his face for that long would feel awkward. But then something happened. “I looked at her for about ten seconds while she smiled,” he said. “And then I thought, ‘Well, I’ll keep it for another five seconds because I don’t think I need it, but it’s kind of interesting to watch her.

Continuing, he added: “And then it turned into five more seconds, and that turned into five more seconds, and then I was so intrigued watching her try to hold back her smile, I started to see things change in her. I started to see the performance that ended in the movie, and she started crying and crying, and it was so compelling to watch that I gave up for about two and a half minutes.

For Goth, it was a painfully therapeutic moment. “I really didn’t think about it at all. Because I would say my body always has better ideas than my head,” she said. saidadding: “That scene turned out to be an incredibly cathartic experience for me. A truly poignant experience. It’s like a purge.

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