How the horror movie Pearl pulled off its daring climax

polygon.com:

[Ed. note: Significant spoilers ahead for Pearl.]

By the time Ti West’s Pearlhits its third act, there aren’t a lot of surprises left in store — just a heavy sense of dread and horror movie inevitability. That’s partially because Pearl is a prequel to West’s horror movie X, and anyone who saw that movie already knows where the title character (played once again by Mia Goth) eventually ends up. At the same time, the movie makes it clear just how ruthless and obsessive Pearl is, which sets up her final moves well in advance.

But there’s one particularly unconventional surprise — a six-minute, single-shot monologue where she lays out the details of her own psychosis and how she feels about the giant hole inside her that made her into a killer. West keeps a fixed camera close on Goth’s face the entire time as she fumbles through the darkness of her own psyche, one emotion chasing another across her face as she tries to explain herself to someone who isn’t even there. It’s a startlingly effective piece of acting and filmmaking, simultaneously minimalist and showy.

“From my side of the street, it was technically not all that complicated,” West tells Polygon. “It was two people sitting at a table in a studio. It’s the dream of how to film something — nothing can go wrong.”

Ironically, though, most of West’s focus in shooting the scene went into making sure nothing went wrong. “I was very much trying to stay out of Mia’s way, and trying to get the crew hyper-focused,” he says. “Once we got to the monologue, nobody was allowed to mess anything up. If anything was wrong — if there was a phone ringing, or someone was in an eyeline, or a mic was in the shot — it needed to happen prior to the monologue starting, because if something