‘Pearl Review: Unmissable Art House Horror Will Paralyse You With Fear

"I'm gonna be a star, one day everybody knows my name..." These are the lines that anyone who saw last year's horror hit X will remember - a line that Mia Goth starred in two amazing films with and repeated three. Mina Goth first played an aspiring sex star in the 70s slasher film T West, and an aging serial killer who stabs all his friends on the street and returns as a younger version of the same killer in the film's prequel.

Starting with the dreaded Pearl X warehouse in the same area. With a loving eye for classic cinematic settings shot in gorgeous Technicolor, West's new film evokes early Hollywood while wielding the ax in every medium. If this is the Wizard of Oz , what will happen to Pearl if Dorothy doesn't leave the farm? Half an hour later, he wreaked havoc...

The year is 1918 and the Spanish Flu epidemic is forcing everyone to wear masks as the world experiences the last brutal days of World War I. For Texas Pearl (Gothic), the past few years have been like a prison. Married to a stranger before moving to Europe, Pearl spends time on a remote farm with her innocent mother (Tandie Wright) and disabled father (Matthew Sunderland). Dreaming of making it big on Broadway, Pearl rehearses in a secret choir so shy her mother doesn't know she wants out.

Cruel like her mother, there's nothing worse than a bright and bubbly pearl, a buried darkness that heats up quickly. A little love for things that hurt. Sex, death, cinema and broken dreams go in the same direction as X , but here the results are very different. His character is sometimes less scary than his gory body, West dances our minds through the mind of a serial killer with floating images on the big screen.

And then there is Gothic. There's more goth here than when he stepped out in the lead role in his last film, playing two characters at once and under a few kilos of latex folds. Blending comedy and tragedy with something truly disturbing (as well as an uncut six-minute monologue and an even more memorable final shot), Goth Oscar Brussels feels like horror's biggest slap in the face today.

With West now working on the 80s MaXXXine series (which brought the story back to the bad video era and gave other characters Goth left behind), the unfinished X- Trilogy looks pretty special.