This demented, charming, Wizard of Oz-like horror is all the more disturbing because it doesn’t look like a horror movie.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 18, 2024

Pearl wants so badly to be a star. Part of the film’s pleasure lies in realising that Goth already is.

| Mar 20, 2023

Goth is riotously entertaining throughout, but two specific scenes, in both of which the camera rests solely on her face for an extended shot, capture the full force of her unnerving talent.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 18, 2023

She slashes, stabs and decapitates aplenty, and proves a dab hand with a pitchfork. That’s essentially the film. It’s Judy Garland goes rogue on a farm.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 17, 2023

Pearl’s torment is believable largely because Goth single-handedly wills it to be. Her commitment to every choked cry for attention, to every glassy-eyed departure from reality, is unimpeachable.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 17, 2023

From the opening credits with their cursive retro font to the end crawl that plays over Goth making a deranged face, the film harks back to vintage B-movies about crazed young ladies...

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 17, 2023

Fresh, subversive and drenched in delicious irony and dark humour. Goth continues to impress.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 17, 2023

This tenderly perverse Cinderella story functions just as well all on its own, and in some respects hovers outside of time, as a parable about cinema in general

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 16, 2023

... An American gothic shocker with a lot to say — and an awards-worthy lead performance from Mia Goth.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 16, 2023

One to chalk up to that small but delightful sub-genre of retro slasher weepies.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 13, 2023

Goth’s Pearl may be a tragicomic creation, but she takes her dreams seriously, which serves as a bulwark against the synthetic glibness that might have creeped into the film.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 3, 2022

West and Goth created an inventive, unique slasher genre, and a movie worth rewatching several times.

| Sep 24, 2022

You leave admiring the film’s kills, the lingua franca of any slasher flick. What stays with you, though, is its portrait of a psychological crack turning into a chasm.

| Sep 22, 2022

If Douglas Sirk made a slasher flick, it would be Pearl.

| Sep 19, 2022

Pearl is a gift.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 18, 2022

Goth delivers an electrifying and truly scary performance.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 16, 2022

Goth makes the most of a croaking, lengthy one-take monologue, during which a new horror monster is born. Pearl is the rare origin story where you see the breakdown happening in real time.

| Original Score: A- | Sep 16, 2022

Pearl gets a little too close to letting you simply laugh at her. We know she wouldn’t like that.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 16, 2022

West, one of the genre’s true artisans of sticky dread, certainly has fun seeding a handsomely mounted and shot (by Eliot Rockett) period melodrama with the trappings of imminent violence...

| Sep 15, 2022

A slow burn — the setting is known as Powder Keg Farms for a reason — and it builds to a riotous climax as Goth guides viewers every loopy, daffy step of the way.

| Original Score: B+ | Sep 15, 2022