If you're looking for blood-red horror and pitch-black humour, then fill your boots - or in this case, dungarees - here.
This prequel to the much-admired 2022 slasher X is turbocharged by a gloriously bonkers performance by Mia Goth. Seriously, it's one of the best acting jobs you'll see this year - a top hat-wearing, liquid morphine-guzzling, monologue-unleashing triumph.
Set in 1918, the film finds Goth's titular antihero with stars in her eyes. She wants to be a dancer but is stuck on the family farm with her puritanical mother and syphilis-ravaged father.
The pressure cooker that is Pearl's mind has been on the stove for way too long and is just about ready to explode. Stand back or you'll get soaked.
From an opening that juxtaposes jaunty malevolence with the orchestral sweep and vivid palette of classic Hollywood, Pearl sets out its stall as a movie for those who crave weirdness on the edge of town - and then some.
Sure enough, director Ti West and star and co-writer Goth are true to their word and give the audience their money's worth in scene after scene as Southern Gothic succumbs to savagery, in style.
Amidst melodrama, musical numbers, maggots and murder, Pearl is the kind of film that keeps upping the ante as it ponders nature versus nurture, the age-old lust for fame and the idea that if you don't find an outlet for your anger, it will find one for you. Throughout, Goth switches gears between childlike, alluring and terrifying. When Pearl exclaims: "I'm a star!", you'll think: "Well, that makes two of you."
There's a Goth-starring sequel on the way called MaXXXine. It's set in the 80s, and they can't come quick enough.
