The Media Tourist

Daniel Craig’s Southern-fried detective returns for another delightfully fun romp

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
Starring Daniel Craig, Janelle Monet & Edward Norton
PG-13
Directed by Rian Johnson

See it: In theaters Nov. 23, on Netflix Dec. 23

Daniel Craig’s master detective, Benoit Blanc, returns to the screen in this frisky, twisty, turn-y followup to the 2019 whodunnit hit. It’s murder mystery time again, as a new group of characters assembles on a zillionaire’s posh private Greek island for a weekend retreat of shocks and surprises—and Benoit is there to sort out the dishy, devilishly clever details when things take a deadly detour.

A multi-layered, whiz-bang gizmo of a movie, this one stars Ed Norton, Kathryn Hahn, Leslie Odom Jr., Kate Hudson, Dave Bautista, Janelle Monae, Outer Banks’ Madelyn Cline, and Game of Thrones’ Jessica Henwick. And of course, everyone becomes a suspect—well, almost everyone, except the victim.

Or the victims.

Director Rian Johnson returns behind the camera, engineering another delightfully fun, deliciously detailed romp as Blanc pieces together a mosaic of puzzling clues to a real murder mystery inside a fake one. Or is it a fake one, inside a real one? Maybe it’s both. Don’t worry: You’ll eventually be led to the truth, motives will be revealed, character flaws become exposed, and Benoit (pronounced Ben-wah) puts it all together. There’s even a McGuffin, a red herring, to distract and misdirect, and a hefty dose of social satire, skewering mega-rich one percenters, clueless celebrities, loony megalomaniacs, macho gun clods and self-serving politicians.

It all owes a big nod, sure, to Agatha Christie, the queen of the murder mystery who developed the time-honored template for the format in her many novels. But this is world-building a modern world away from the Brit-centric manners of Christie’s classics. Glass Onion glitters with snappy celebrity cameos by Ethan Hawke, Hugh Grant and Serena Williams. Joseph Gordon-Levitt (the star of one of director Johnson’s other films, Looper) isn’t seen, but he’s heard—his voice is the booming, recurring “dong” of a chiming clock. Jeremy Renner might not have his own brand of hot sauce, and Jared Leto’s “hard kombucha” might not be a real thing, but here, they’re part of the movie’s rich tapestry of pop-culture in-jokes. CNN’s Anderson Cooper also gets named-checked; supposedly, he throws some wild, way-out parties.  

Craig, recently retired from playing James Bond in the latest chapters of the super-spy franchise, settles into his new role—as the “world’s greatest detective”—with smooth, comedic ease, flexing hammy chops of loquacious, Southern-fried, cigar-smoking hokum that were never part of his arsenal as OO7. It’s easy to imagine a wider Knives Out world, more movies revolving around the dapper Blanc, who lives for the game, the hunt, the thrill of a mystery just begging to be solved. Soaking in a bathtub, holed up in his COVID bubble, playing online games with Angela Lansbury, Natasha Lyonne and Stephen Sondheim, just doesn’t cut it for Benoit. He longs to be out there, doing his thing, connecting the dots, cracking crimes. Hopefully he’ll get to do even more of it.

And what do a cocktail napkin, the world’s most iconic painting, rhinoceros-horn boner pills, Google alerts, sweatshop sweatpants, a Bach fugue, old-school fax machines and a glittering crystal of pure, clean energy have to do with it all? Look into the layers of this Glass Onion, as the Beatles song instructs, and oh, yeah—what was complex becomes clear, and you might find what was always there, hiding in plain sight.

How two crusading reporters brought down a grotesque Hollywood Goliath

She Said
Starring Carey Mulligan & Zoe Kazan
Directed by Maria Schrader
Rated R

See it: In theaters Nov. 18

A pair of New York Times reporters digs into a bombshell story of sexual assault in this intimate and powerful drama about the downfall of Hollywood movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan play Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor, the two real-life journalists who doggedly pursue the rumors of Weinstein’s “problematic behavior” that lead them into a toxic swamp of wide-ranging, systemic misconduct.

“The wrongdoing in Hollywood,” says Kantor, “is overwhelming.”

Basing her film on the book Twohey and Kantor later wrote, German director Maria Schneider (who won an Emmy for the Netflix series Unorthodox) bores down into the intense investigative legwork—the nuts and bolts of how the newspaper approached such an explosive story. Weinstein, the head of the film company Miramax, became Hollywood kryptonite after Twohey and Kantor’s expose ushered in a chorus of more than 80 women to raise their voices in allegations against him, leading to his eventual conviction as a sex offender. Although the list of his victims included dozens of well-known actresses, plus assistants and former employees, the movie focuses on a just a handful (including Ashley Judd, who plays herself) telling the reporters their wrenching experiences.

It’s a serious story about a sordid affair, and it’s galvanized by the gravity of its two leads. Mulligan, the British Oscar nominee who dealt a previous blow to caustic masculinity in Promising Young Woman, brings emotional heft to her role as Twohey, balancing the rigors and stress of her job with her responsibilities as a new mom. Kazan, granddaughter of acclaimed director Elia Kazan, is an Emmy winner also playing another working mother. Both Twohey and Kantor have young daughters, and the film suggests the two hard-working reporters aren’t just chasing down leads, tracking decades of non-disclosure agreements and million-dollar settlements, glued to their iPhones talking to sources, and burning the midnight oil for a story. They’re making the world safer for a younger generation of women.

Patricia Clarkson plays their steely, seasoned, sure-handed editor, Rebecca Corbett. Andre Braugher is Dean Baquet, the Times’ managing editor, who’s dealt with Weinstein before—and doesn’t take any of his grandstanding b.s.

This saga of fiercely dedicated female empowerment is a solid journalistic “procedural” about the vital role of the press to find and present the truth. But it doesn’t sensationalize; we only get a brief glimpse of Weinstein (played by Boardwalk Empire’s Mike Houston) late in the film. But She Said draws a through-line, connecting the monstrous acts of the movie honcho to a much more pervasive network of abuse, allegations, deniers and enablers. Remember Bill O’Reilly at Fox News, and the 26 women who accused Donald Trump of kissing, groping or raping them?

The week of the movie’s release, Weinstein is facing even more charges, released from prison to stand trial in Los Angeles.

An important film with an impactful message, She Said spotlights how the journalistic sling of two women helped bring down a Hollywood Goliath. But it shows that Weinstein is only the ugly, exposed tip of a much bigger iceberg, one that had been submerged far too long. “If this can happen to Hollywood actresses, who else can it happen to?” asks Kantor rhetorically.

Who else, indeed? She Said says it could be anyone, anywhere, anytime, and reminds us that fighting sexual abuse is an ongoing battle—for everyone.  

All-star cast spins around murder mystery with a message

Amsterdam
Starring Christian Bale, Margot Robbie & John David Washington
Directed by David O. Russell
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Oct. 7

A trio of friends from the waning days of World War I forms the hub of this freewheeling screwball yarn of camaraderie, conspiracy, art, beauty and making love, not war.

Director David O. Russell, who also wrote and produced the film, corrals an all-star cast for his quirky caper comedy, which unspools in 1933 as a pair of World War I veterans and a wealthy socialite artist find themselves drawn into a murder mystery, one possibly connected to a deeper, nefarious political plot.

Christian Bale is Burt Berendsen, a physician who served on the battlefields of World War I, now treating the pain and reconstructive needs of other veterans while planning a big WWI reunion of all the servicemen who returned to New York City. Things begin to get messy and mayhem-ic when he and his lawyer pal, Harold Woodsman (John David Washington), are asked to investigate the suspicious death of their highly decorated former commanding officer (Ed Bagley Jr.).

Then they get blamed for the murder—well, actually, for another murder. How can they clear their names?  

Soon enough, they are reconnected with Valerie Voze (Margot Robbie), whom they met some 15 years earlier when Burt and Harold were both recovering in a Belgium war hospital where Valerie was working as a Red Cross nurse. The two GIs were awestruck to find out their gorgeous Florence Nightingale had an unusual hobby, using all the bloody shrapnel and bone fragments taken from their battered flesh to make pieces of art, transforming their brokenness into strangely beautiful curios.

Then the three of them ventured together to Amsterdam, on a mission to get Burt a glass eye to replace the one he’d lost in combat. The capital city of the Netherlands was a blissful, dream-like high, a respite of peace after war, one they didn’t want to end.  

You probably won’t see another movie this year with so many stars twinkling, twirling, popping and pinging around each other. There’s musical superstar Taylor Swift, as the hyper-paranoid daughter of the deceased officer. Zoe Saldana plays a coroner who opens Burt’s eyes (actually, his eye) to true love. Rami Malek is a suave, wealthy businessman whose huffy-stuffy upper-crust wife (Anya Taylor-Joy) becomes positively mushy at the thought of meeting a famous military hero (Robert De Niro). And hey—there’s Chris Rock, Mike Myers and Michael Shannon!

With a leading character who has only one real eye and a fake eyeball, we’re reminded that looks—what we see and choose to see—can be deceiving. We’re prompted to look carefully at people and things, to discern who’s who, who’s what and what’s really going on.

Viewers will see, when the film opens and then after it ends, that what’s going on in this lively, light-footed lark is based (somewhat) on something very serious—namely, a dangerous rise of fascism after World War I, which eventually seeded the horrors of Nazi Germany, the Holocaust and another world war. On that level, Amsterdam is a cautionary tale about extremists and anarchists looking to overthrow the government and subvert America’s democratic process—“patriots” who would sabotage the election process to install their own dictator-like leader. You only need one eye to see the contemporary parallels with today’s political turmoil.

Director Russell love star-packing his movies, including American Hustle, Silver Linings Playbook and Joy. This one reunites him with a couple of his favorite actors, Bale (who also appeared in American Hustle and The Fighter) and De Niro (also in Hustle, plus Playbook and Joy). Both screen veterans provide eccentric anchors for the colorful tale as it spins and weaves its rich tapestry of parasitic cuckoo birds, Aryan supremacy, Black history, American fascists, eugenics, high-ranking corruption and fat-cat industrialists, drawing them all into its dark-comedy swirl. It’s Robbie, however, who becomes the story’s heart-and-soul centerpiece, with her character reminding us that we’re all damaged in some way, everyone is hurting inside or out, and kindness, not hate, is the balm for our wounds, our scars and our brokenness.

At one point, she, Burt and Harold perform a French song, a little ditty that a puzzled listener has troubling following. “It’s not supposed to make sense,” Valerie says. “We just made it up.”

This mostly made-up period frolic has a kernel of harsh historical truth at the center of its merrily crowded, retro-rollicking tale of friendship, bonds that last a lifetime and places in the heart—not to mention extinct birds, body parts as reappropriated art, and an ensemble of endearing oddballs. It’s a lot, but it’s also a lot of frisky fun.

Just try to hold on to your glass eye.

Elizabeth Banks & Sigourney Weaver ignite a timely pro-choice tale

Call Jane
Starring Elizabeth Banks & Sigourney Weaver
Directed by Phyllis Nagy
Rated R

See it in theaters Oct. 28, 2022

With abortion rights rolled back earlier this year by the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of the landmark legislation Roe v. Wade, the timing is perfect for this movie about a group of female activists who made it possible in the 1960s for women to safely terminate their pregnancies during a pre-Roe time when abortion was outlawed as a criminal act.

The film, the directorial debut of Phyllis Nagy (who received an Oscar nomination for her screenplay for the critically praised Carol in 2015), benefits greatly from the presence of two top-tier actors, Elizabeth Banks and Sigourney Weaver. They’re a dynamic duo whose interplay generates the sparks and the sizzle for the depiction of the proto-pro-choice organization known as the Janes, an underground Chicago collective run by women, for women.

Banks, whose impressive resume also includes directing and producing, again shows her versatility and comfort in any kind of genre or format, be it lite and fluffy or heavy and hefty—from the ribald comedy of Movie 43, Wet Hot American Summer and The Happytime Murders to the YA dystopias of The Hunger Games, playing Beach Boy Brian Wilson’s romantic interest in Love & Mercy or slipping into her recurring roles on TV’s Modern Family and Mrs. America. Here she stars as Joy, a suburban homemaker who becomes involved with the Janes after finding out her pregnancy has life-threatening complications. It could literally kill her to deliver another baby.

Weaver, known to legions of moviegoers for her roles in the Alien, Avatar and Ghostbusters franchises, plays Virginia, the firebrand figurehead of the collective, who welcomes Joy as a client, then ushers her into deeper involvement with the group. Eventually, Joy is assisting the clinic’s cocky, somewhat creepy “doctor” (Cory Michael Smith, who played the Riddler on the Fox TV series Gotham) in the procedure room. Soon she’s performing the abortions herself.

Women all over Chicago come to know that when they are unable to get what they need anywhere else, they can “call Jane.”

Because abortion can put you in jail, the Janes operate as back-alley subversives, paying local mobsters for a place to work and for protection from police raids. Joy keeps her activities with the Janes a secret from her lawyer husband (Chris Messina), their teenage daughter (Grace Edwards) and her widowed next-door neighbor (Kate Mara). All that time she’s gone from the house? Joy says she’s taking an art class.

But what she’s doing—and hiding—becomes pitch-perfect clear when an undercover cop (John Magaro, from the movies First Cow, The Many Saints of Newark, The Big Short and Not Fade Away, and also in Carol) shows up at her home to ask a few questions.

Wunmi Mosaku might look familiar; the Nigerian actor has been featured in roles on TV’s Lovecraft Country, Loki, Temple and Luther. She plays the Janes’ only member “of color,” who pushes the group toward taking in more women who cannot afford to pay the steep procedure fees—and who often happen to be Black.

And mostly hidden under that nun smock, as Sister Mike, is Aida Turtoro, who played Tony’s sister, Janice, on all seven seasons of The Sopranos.

The movie is a tidy, trim, modest little tale about a very messy, moving-and-shaking time, back in 1968. Streets were roiling with Vietnam war protestors, women’s lib was gaining traction, the Black Panthers were on the move, and a room full of cigarette-smoking doctors could smugly dismiss a pregnant woman by telling her that her unborn baby’s life is more precious than her own, forcing her to find someone else—or some other way—to end her pregnancy. In Call Jane, we meet some of those women and hear about many more: rape victims, pregnant young teens, sexually harassed office workers coerced into sex with their bosses.

Thank goodness we’ve moved on from those dark, repressive days…right?

This cautionary ‘60s snapshot ends on a hopeful woman-power coda, where Virginia, Joy and the other Janes celebrate the 1972 Supreme Court decision that finally made abortion legal. But they note that there is still more work to do, other issues to tackle, other mountains to climb.

And sometimes, as we know, some mountains must be climbed again.

Call Jane is a pointed reminder that, like the old saying goes, women’s work is never done—alas.

Frisky murder-mystery ensemble comedy ‘Amsterdam’ has a serious undertone of truth

Amsterdam
Starring Christian Bale, Margot Robbie & John David Washington
Directed by David O. Russell
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Oct. 7

A trio of friends from the waning days of World War I forms the hub of this freewheeling screwball yarn of camaraderie, conspiracy, art, beauty and making love, not war.

Director David O. Russell, who also wrote and produced the film, corrals an all-star cast for his quirky caper comedy, which unspools in 1933 as a pair of World War I veterans and a wealthy socialite artist find themselves drawn into a murder mystery, one possibly connected to a deeper, nefarious political plot.

Christian Bale is Burt Berendsen, a physician who served on the battlefields of World War I, now treating the pain and reconstructive needs of other veterans while planning a big WWI reunion of all the servicemen who returned to New York City. Things begin to get messy and mayhem-ic when he and his lawyer pal, Harold Woodsman (John David Washington), are asked to investigate the suspicious death of their highly decorated former commanding officer (Ed Bagley Jr.).

Then they get blamed for the murder—well, actually, for another murder. How can they clear their names?  

Soon enough, they are reconnected with Valerie Voze (Margot Robbie), whom they met some 15 years earlier when Burt and Harold were both recovering in a Belgium war hospital where Valerie was working as a Red Cross nurse. The two GIs were awestruck to find out their gorgeous Florence Nightingale had an unusual hobby, using all the bloody shrapnel and bone fragments taken from their battered flesh to make pieces of art, transforming their brokenness into strangely beautiful curios.

Then the three of them ventured together to Amsterdam, on a mission to get Burt a glass eye to replace the one he’d lost in combat. The capital city of the Netherlands was a blissful, dream-like high, a respite of peace after war, one they didn’t want to end.  

You probably won’t see another movie this year with so many stars twinkling, twirling, popping and pinging around each other. There’s musical superstar Taylor Swift, as the hyper-paranoid daughter of the deceased officer. Zoe Saldana plays a coroner who opens Burt’s eyes (actually, his eye) to true love. Rami Malek is a suave, wealthy businessman whose huffy-stuffy upper-crust wife (Anya Taylor-Joy) becomes positively mushy at the thought of meeting a famous military hero (Robert De Niro). And hey—there’s Chris Rock, Mike Myers and Michael Shannon!

With a leading character who has only one real eye and a fake eyeball, we’re reminded that looks—what we see and choose to see—can be deceiving. We’re prompted to look carefully at people and things, to discern who’s who, who’s what and what’s really going on.

Viewers will see, when the film opens and then after it ends, that what’s going on in this lively, light-footed lark is based (somewhat) on something very serious—namely, a dangerous rise of fascism after World War I, which eventually seeded the horrors of Nazi Germany, the Holocaust and another world war. On that level, Amsterdam is a cautionary tale about extremists and anarchists looking to overthrow the government and subvert America’s democratic process—“patriots” who would sabotage the election process to install their own dictator-like leader. You only need one eye to see the contemporary parallels with today’s political turmoil.

Director Russell loves star-packing his movies, including American Hustle, Silver Linings Playbook and Joy. This one reunites him with a couple of his favorite actors, Bale (who also appeared in American Hustle and The Fighter) and De Niro (also in Hustle, plus Playbook and Joy). Both screen veterans provide eccentric anchors for the colorful tale as it spins and weaves its rich tapestry of parasitic cuckoo birds, Aryan supremacy, Black history, American fascists, eugenics, high-ranking corruption and fat-cat industrialists, drawing them all into its dark-comedy swirl. It’s Robbie, however, who becomes the story’s heart-and-soul centerpiece, with her character reminding us that we’re all damaged in some way, everyone is hurting inside or out, and kindness, not hate, is the balm for our wounds, our scars and our brokenness.

At one point, she, Burt and Harold perform a French song, a little ditty that a puzzled listener has troubling following. “It’s not supposed to make sense,” Valerie says. “We just made it up.”

This mostly made-up period frolic has a kernel of harsh historical truth at the center of its merrily crowded, retro-rollicking tale of friendship, bonds that last a lifetime and places in the heart—not to mention extinct birds, body parts as reappropriated art, and an ensemble of endearing oddballs. It’s a lot, but it’s also a lot of frisky fun.

Just try to hold on to your glass eye.

Zac Effron brings pop-a-top cheer to Vietnam troops

The Greatest Beer Run Ever
Starring Zac Efron
Directed by Peter Farrelly
Rated R

In select theaters and on Apple TV+ on Sept. 30

There’ve been a lot of movies about the war in Vietnam, and some of them have rightfully become classics: Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Born on the Fourth of July, Casualties of War, The Deer Hunter, Platoon. They all plumbed the intense human drama, the moral and ethical complications and the horrific realities of a prolonged conflict that cost nearly 60,000 American lives, plus with more than 3 million civilians and soldiers in North and South Vietnam.

There’s that league of masterpieces, then there’s The Greatest Beer Run ever. In beer terms, this movie’s a bit frothy and lite.

Zac Efron stars as “Chickie” Donohoe, a hawkish, mouthy New Yorker who decides to deliver some back-home barroom cheer to the neighborhood lads serving and fighting in Southeast Asia. He says he’s going there to hand-deliver them cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon from the local pub.

It’s 1967, and Chickie is a staunch supporter of the U.S. involvement in the war; he thinks protesters are “Commie bastards” and scumbags, undermining the heroic efforts of G.I.s to spread the American way. He thinks TV shouldn’t report “bad news,” only the great things our guys are doing. He’s a good-time-Charlle boozehound who freeloads off his parents, doesn’t follow through on anything and has made it so far on his cocky charms.

Even though his friends and his family tell him his idea is foolish, stupid, colossally dangerous and likely impossible, Chickie sees his beer run as his way of supporting the troops. “Everyone’s doin’ something,” he muses. “I’m doin’ nothing.”

So off he goes, with a bag full of brewskies.

Director and writer Peter Farrelly is best known for the raunchy comedies he made with his filmmaking brother, Bobby, including Dumb and Dumber, Shallow Hal, There’s Something About Mary, The Heartbreak Kid and a 2012 contemporary twist on The Three Stooges. He branched out in 2018 into more “serious” fare with The Green Book, which brought him a trio of Oscars.

Like Green Book, which was based on a true story—a Black classical pianist and his streetwise Italian driver find common ground on a trip across the Deep South in the early 1960s—Beer Run is also based on real retro events as detailed by the real-life Chickie in a 2020 book.

Efron, the former High School Musical Disney star, went on to big-screen roles in The Greatest Showman, the movie remakes of TV’s Baywatch, Steven King’s Firestarter and the musical Hairspray, and he played notorious serial killer Ted Bundy in Netflix’s Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. He gives Chickie a kind a contagious, dunderheaded likeability; some of that might be mojo of the moustache he appears to have borrowed from Tom Selleck or Burt Reynolds. 

It’s a somewhat whimsical, fanciful tale, about a young, preppy-looking American guy who hops off a U.S. Merchant Marine freighter into the hot zone with a sack of suds. And Farrelly leans on his light-touch comedy chops for running gags, bro banter, punchlines and scenes that point out the tall-tale absurdity of it all. But the movie’s tone is all over the place; the comedy often clashes with the raw, visceral realities of war, and the watered-down production values feel like hammy Hollywood hokum. There’s little “movie magic” to plunge viewers in the mud, blood and teeming turmoil of a country ripped apart by war.

But there’s plenty of magic in that duffel that Chickie dutifully totes around everywhere he goes. At one point, a soldier asks him how many beers are in there. “A bunch,” he replies. Indeed—it seems to be a bottomless pit of boozy sorcery, an endless well of pop-top refreshment. Chickie hands out Pabsts all over Vietnam, on the streets, in barracks, on the battlefield, even tossing them from a helicopter. It’s like Felix the Cat’s Bag of Tricks, a cartoonish stunt. Maybe Jesus had a Chickie bag full of loaves and fishes at the Sermon on the Mount.

The movie brings up issues of relevance, then and now—about lying government officials, the role and responsibilities of the media, a nation divided and Vietnam’s caustic toll. Chickie’s eyes are gradually opened to what’s really going on, watching in shock as a prisoner of war is tossed from a military chopper, or seeing first-hand the dirty work keeping the war machine humming. He comes to realize that, hey, maybe sending American troops to get involved in a civil conflict halfway across the globe, under the ruse of “fighting Communism,” isn’t such a swell idea. His bag of beer doesn’t change anything in Vietnam, or about Vietnam. It does, however, wash away Chickie’s delusions.

A chorus of cardboard-thin supporting characters pops in and out; this is Chickie’s movie, based on Chickie’s book, based on something Chickie did 50-some years ago, and everyone else is just along to shore up his chummy chronicle. Some two decades removed from the Roman-arena battlefield of Gladiator, Russell Crowe plays a gruff, weary war photographer. His size is, ahem, formidable, but his duties are small, just like the iconic Bill Murray’s portrayal of the flag-waving WWII-veteran bartender back at Chickie’s favorite Manhattan watering hole.

Don’t look for The Greatest Beer Run Ever to get any champagne toasts at next year’s Oscars. It’s a tidy little diversion, an over-simplified story about a shallow fellow who finally follows through on something and learns something else—something many Americans already knew—in the process. It didn’t end the war, but Chickie’s beer run changed his way of thinking.

It’s no Apocalypse Now or Full Metal Jacket, but it has just enough uplifting Green Book DNA to make this sudsy, somewhat superficial tale go down easy, like a foxhole quaff from one of the lukewarm ales rattling around in Chickie’s duffel bag.  

So, drink up. This beer’s on Chickie!

Mia Goth stars in director Ti West’s stylish slasher-flick prequel

Pearl
Starring Mia Goth, David Corenswet & Tandi Wright
Directed by Ti West
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Sept. 16

Wondering how an innocent farmer’s daughter becomes a raging homicidal maniac? Well, then, Pearl’s your girl.

Director Ti West’s carnage-packed, candy-colored creepshow is a prequel to X, his horror hit from earlier this year, which featured the character in an advanced age in the late 1970s, lusting for her youth and lost sexuality while preying on an amateur film crew secretly making a dirty movie out behind her barn. Former model-turned-actress Mia Goth played double roles in X, and she now returns as the younger Pearl.

For anyone who saw X (and that’s probably not a lot of you), Pearl fills in the early years and reveals the twisted roots of the young woman who’ll eventually become lethally handy with an axe and a pitchfork. (And a pet alligator.) If you didn’t see X, well, just sit back and watch the lurid nightmare unfold.

Set in 1918, it’s a slasher-flick homage to lavish, big-screen Technicolor spectacles of yesteryear, with overt winks to The Wizard of Oz, rah-rah musicals, war movies and classic Hitchcock. There’s even a nod to the modern world, as characters mask up a la COVID to prevent the spread of the Spanish flu, fearful of bringing the invisible invader into their homes.

Pearl is a war bride whose husband is away fighting “over there,” while she stays at home with her unyielding, German-immigrant mother (Tandi Wright) and invalid, wheelchair-bound father (Matthew Sunderland). Something’s not quite right with Pearl, and she knows it. “I’m worried there may be something really wrong with me,” she tells her sunny sister-in-law, Misty (Emma Jenkins-Purro). “I’m not a good person.”

A cooked pig crawling with maggots becomes a metaphor for the rot that eventually eats away the “good,” and the normal, inside of Pearl.

So, what turns her into a psycho? Maybe it’s being cooped up and confined, like the cow and the goat in their pens, inside a quarantined house with an overbearing mother and an unresponsive father. Maybe it’s because she feels no one ever hears her prayers, and the religious zealotry she’s been force-fed tastes bitter and empty. Maybe it’s her conflicted, confused feelings of sexual repression, and her marriage to a husband she knows she may never see again. Perhaps it’s her boiling-over frustration at being stuck in the middle of an American nowhere (actually, the movie was filmed in New Zealand), with dashed hopes of ever getting out and experiencing the bigger world, in Hollywood or perhaps even Paris.

And then there’s the obsessive tug of Pearl’s dreams, her fantasy of becoming a “follies” girl like the ones in the newsreels she sees at the local picture show. At an audition for a touring dancing troupe, she steps onstage, onto the “X” that’s been taped on the floor to show her where to stand—a mark that sets her identity, secures her place in the world, and seals her destiny of destruction. (It also shows that the anxieties—and crushed hopes—of contestants on contemporary TV talent completions, like The X Factor, America’s Got Talent or American Idol, certainly aren’t anything new. But will any of those wannabe’s become psychos? Guess we’ll have to wait and see.)

David Corenswet plays the dashing movie-theater projectionist who flatters Pearl, telling her she can be anything she wants to be, go anywhere she wants to go. He also introduces her to his bed, and to pornography, stirring the tangled, matted mess of psychological, pathological madness in her head. (And suggesting that overheated fantasies of being up on the silver screen or the stage, becoming famous, can really mess up impressionable young minds.) When Pearl stops her bicycle to dry-hump a straw man in a cornfield, it’s a crazily carnal twist on Dorothy’s meeting with the scarecrow en route to Oz. Only there’s no Yellow Brick Road on Pearl’s highway to hell.

Goth is a British actress who had a notable supporting role in Emma (2020)—and got her movie start in the notorious two-part Nymphomaniac (2013), an erotic opus about promiscuous sexuality. In a bravura, gutsy performance, she pulls off the trick of making us feel both sympathy and revulsion for Pearl, whose severe emotional damage creates monstrously scary impulses. Is she crazy? Oh, yeah. Is she unhinged enough to lash out at anyone, or anything, that gets in the way of her dreams? For sure. Even farm animals—and prenatal alligators—aren’t safe.

Yes, it’s violent. It’s bloody. It’s meant to be disturbing. But this super-stylized shocker has a wild, freakishly compelling story—about how mental illness and instability can turn almost anyone into a monster, in 1918 or today. And it’s all packaged with a stylish cinematic flourish and flair, and a splatter-y caution that echoes ancient folktales, about children longing to “leave the farm” for the big city.     

“Seems there’s something missing in me that the rest of the world has,” Pearl says at one point. “All I really wanted is to be loved.”

Something may be missing for Pearl, but Goth has certainly found it, in a horror franchise that now plans its third chapter, MaXXXine, about her character from X as the sole survivor of Pearl’s rampage in that film. (Stay through the credits to see the teaser.)

In her case, “X” indeed marks the spot.