I knew that this movie was filmed concurrently with yesterday’s film, X, and so helped to add some personal backstory and motivation for Mia Goth in her portrayal of the old woman in that film having done the story of her younger self in this one. Given how pleasantly surprised I was with the first entry in the trilogy and how, of the three, this one seemed to get the most word of mouth buzz about it, I was pretty hyped going in to this one.

The movie takes place on the same farm from X but now way back in 1918 during the first World War and the Spanish Flu epidemic. A young Pearl has dreams of becoming a famous dancer in the pictures and leaving the farm behind but her stern German mother is quick to remind her of the reality of her situation. She needs to help since they can’t afford any farmhands and her father has some unnamed illness that has left him mostly paralyzed. Pearl’s dreams cannot be stopped, however, and she is going to do whatever it takes to make them come true. This will, of course, include various amounts of violent, bloody murder.

Maybe it was the increased expectations going in to this but I feel like this just didn’t hit the same highs that X did. While certainly a fun little peek into the character, it didn’t actually add anything interesting and even detracts from the other movie a bit. Now instead of X being this interesting meditation on regret and the jealousy of age when confronted with youth turning into murderous rage to try and recapture that feeling again, Pearl retroactively makes it so that the woman is just a crazy murderer and probably would have stabbed all of them regardless. The fact that the opening scene has Pearl stab a goose like a psycho and feed it to an alligator means you also don’t get any slow burn reveal that maybe something isn’t right with her. It’s just “Oh, this girl is insane” right from the jump.

Even Mia Goth ends up feeling wasted most of the time. She spends the movie doing an aw shucks southern farmgirl voice that feels so out of place given the stern German parents that raised her but you could chalk that up to an affectation she uses to try to fit in. She has some scenes about not being like other people and feeling like something is missing in her that other people have and I wish we could have gotten a bit more of it. She has an extended monologue scene towards the end of the film that is probably the one point in the movie where I really felt drawn in and fully engaged. It’s not that the movie was bad, mind you, but just that the way it was done didn’t feel particularly impressive in any way.

In all, good enough to watch if you loved X for some added context but not good enough that I would necessarily want to watch this as a stand alone.

Score: 3 out 5