Last week, I reviewed the first movie in this trilogy, called X. This week, I’m looking at the prequel Pearl, which gives us the origin story for one of the villains in X. Both the original villain and the main character in this movie–same character, just younger–are played by Mia Goth who really carries this trilogy on her back at times.

I liked X a lot and I was really excited to see what Pearl had to offer! What I found was… a little confusing, but definitely worth talking about. So let’s do it!

Good

Mia Goth carries this movie even more than with X. She really is the entire movie. She does a fantastic job playing the origin story of a character from X, which of course involves a lot of the same settings and imagery since this movie is literally set on the same farm, but 60ish years earlier.

This feels like a totally different genre of movie than X, and I love that. It makes me more excited to watch Maxxxine because I like seeing this director play around with different genre trademarks. 

I’ll talk more about the first half below, but the second half of this movie really kicks things up. It’s not scary, necessarily, although there are some incredible moments involving fear, guilt, shame, and everything else you’d expect. Also some pretty gross moments. (Note from my sister-in-law— way too many maggots.) The monologue toward the end and the ending itself felt refreshing and unpredictable, so I think this movie actually gets better as you go, which is always a good thing in my book.

Bad

The beginning of Pearl is more upbeat than I expected. Lots of visual and story callbacks to X. I enjoyed these at first, but they sort of lacked any real punch after the initial, “Oh yeah! I recognize that alligator.” (Sincerely, I love the alligator stuff in this series.) Almost every major plot point or theme from X has a twin in this movie, so that can be good or bad, depending on how you feel.

The first half of this movie is basically Carrie. It’s done well, but that specific plot has been recycled so many times it didn’t interest me a ton. Not that Stephen King invented it, either. Plenty of people have done and will always do the “overly religious mother with a daughter who feels trapped and abused” motif. It’s just predictable.

Once the movie switches gears in the second half, I found myself enjoying it a lot more. The first half and especially the last 20 minutes of that first half failed to hold my attention.

Overall

This movie pays homage to a lot of things–including its own trilogy–but it comes across messy at times and very predictable toward the beginning. Some nice call-backs and it’s extremely well done, mostly entertaining, but it’s definitely a step below X for me.

I’ll give this movie a 6.3/10.

Read my full review of X here.

Review of MaXXXine coming soon!