You might’ve heard about Pearl, a startling fever dream of a horror film that’s currently playing in theaters and getting a lot of well-deserved attention. It’s the second film in director Ti West’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre–inspired trilogy, which started with X (2022) and will be followed by the upcoming MaXXXine, featuring murder and mayhem in the rural American heartland. Martin Scorsese is really pounding the drum for it:

Ti West’s movies have a kind of energy that is so rare these days, powered by a pure, undiluted love for cinema. You feel it in every frame. A prequel to ‘X’ made in a diametrically opposite cinematic register (think 50s Scope color melodramas), ‘Pearl’ makes for a wild, mesmerizing, deeply — and I mean deeply — disturbing 102 minutes. West and his muse and creative partner Mia Goth really know how to toy with their audience. . . .  I was enthralled, then disturbed, then so unsettled that I had trouble getting to sleep.

Pearl is about its title character (Mia Goth), a young woman in 1918 stuck in a terrible limbo on her parents’ farm while her husband is off fighting in World War I. Her mother (Tandi Wright) is a harsh taskmaster and a punitively religious woman, a German immigrant highly conscious of the dangers of anti-German prejudice during the war and half-expecting to be shunned by the community. Her father (Matthew Sunderland), physically immobilized in his wheelchair and incapable of speech, is grudgingly tended to by his wife and daughter. The Spanish flu epidemic has further isolated them in a festering state of resentment.