The prequel to one of my favourite films from last year in X, Pearl serves as the origin story for that film’s surprisingly sympathetic villain of the same name. After how much X wound up impressing me, both as a straight-forward genre experience and as a multi-faceted treatise on the nature of horror, pornography, and cinema in general, I went into this excited but not necessarily knowing what I was getting myself into. And truth be told, I wound up enjoying this even more than X… but not for the reasons I was expecting.
