Film Review: ‘The Girl Who Cried Pearls’

The National Film Board of Canada has long built its reputation on films that challenge audiences, rather than comforting them. With The Girl Who Cried Pearls, that tradition continues, and arguably, reaches a new level of quiet devastation.

Fresh off its win at the Academy Awards for Best Animated Short Film, the 17-minute stop-motion piece is deceptively simple. Set in early 20th century Montreal, it follows a poor boy who discovers that the tears of a girl he loves turn into pearls — a miracle that quickly becomes a moral trap.

What unfolds is less a fairy tale than a slow moral unravelling.

Directed by Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski, the film leans heavily into the aesthetics of classic European fables — shadowy interiors, fragile characters, and a world that feels both magical and decayed. The stop-motion animation is painstakingly detailed, with handmade puppets that move in ways that are just slightly unnatural. That “uncanny” quality is deliberate, and it works, since it is not a story meant to feel safe. Instead, it is meant to linger somewhere between beauty and discomfort.

The film’s strongest element is its refusal to sentimentalize its premise. A lesser story might treat the girl’s pearl-tears as a symbol of purity or sacrifice. Here, they become currency. The boy, initially motivated by love, begins selling the pearls to a predatory pawnbroker, and the line between care and exploitation dissolves quickly.

This is where The Girl Who Cried Pearls sharpens into something more than a period piece. It becomes a parable — one about capitalism, storytelling, and the uneasy relationship between the two.

There is a cruel irony at the heart of the film: the boy’s success depends not just on the pearls themselves, but on the story he builds around them. By the end, that story may be more valuable than the “truth.” The film’s final twist — ambiguous, even divisive — forces viewers to confront how easily they too, have been drawn in. The film opening with a close-up shot of a red apple is not a mere coincidence, but fine symbolism, according to me, at least.

Online discussion reflects that tension. Some viewers have praised the ending’s ambiguity as “clever” and thematically consistent, while others found it jarring or even deceptive, arguing that it undercuts the emotional core of the narrative. 

That divide is not a flaw. That is the point.

Visually, the film is striking but not conventionally beautiful. The muted palette and exaggerated puppet features create a world that feels worn down by poverty and grief. Combined with Colm Feore’s measured narration and a haunting score by Patrick Watson, the atmosphere becomes almost suffocating.

And yet, for all its technical precision, the film’s emotional impact hinges on restraint. There are no grand speeches, no overt moral lessons. Instead, the story unfolds with a kind of quiet inevitability — as if the ending was always going to arrive, no matter how much we might wish otherwise.

That inevitability is what makes the film linger.

At just under 18 minutes, The Girl Who Cried Pearls demands very little time. But it asks its audience to sit with ambiguity, to question its own assumptions, and to recognize how easily empathy can be transformed into transaction.

It is not an easy watch. It is not meant to be. But it is, without question, worth watching.