Ti West works more genre-manipulating magic with X
The director’s horror movie about a porn shoot deconstructs storytelling cliches while exploring the allure of youth — and its reflection on the aged
Film Reviews X
Ti West’s best films have explored the tension between old and new; his one-two breakthroughs House Of The Devil and The Innkeepers were steeped in the form and technique of horror subgenres from decades past but executed with a skillful, contemporary sensibility. His new film, X, embraces that idea more literally and more confidently—and may be his most crowd-pleasing to date, at least for folks who like watching characters get dismembered by one another.
The story of a group of filmmakers who encounter more than they bargain for during an adult film shoot, West’s latest exploits two familiar scenarios simultaneously while offering a rejoinder to the moralistic gender and sexual stereotypes that defined older horror scenarios. Shellacked in blue eye shadow, feathered hair, and a gallon of lip gloss, Mia Goth commands the superstar adulation that her character craves, while a supporting cast including Martin Henderson, Brittany Snow, Scott Mescudi, Jenna Ortega, and Owen Campbell navigate both low-budget pornography and backwoods terror.
Goth (Suspiria ’18) plays Maxine, a young pole dancer who agrees to star in an adult film “executive produced” by her fiancée Wayne (Henderson, doing a fine Matthew McConaughey impersonation) and costarring her colleague Bobby-Lynne (Snow) and Bobby-Lynne’s veteran boyfriend Jackson (Mescudi). Enlisting an over-ambitious young filmmaker named RJ (Campbell) to direct and his mousy girlfriend Lorraine (Ortega) to run the sound equipment, Wayne piles the group into a van and heads for a remote farm outside of Houston to shoot Maxine’s star-making masterpiece.
When they arrive to the farm, its octogenarian caretaker Howard (Stephen Ure) warns them not to disturb his reclusive wife Pearl, who he says is unwell. Despite their best efforts to follow Howard’s edict, the actors—and especially Maxine—increasingly begin to feel the presence of the rural homeowners, whose reaction to the group’s lack of inhibitions strikes an uneasy balance between repulsion and titillation, prompting them to consider whether to stop the shoot or press on in the face of their hosts’ disapproval.
X is like a turducken of overplayed storytelling tropes—in the porn movie, the traveling salesman who encounters a farmer’s buxom daughters after his car breaks down, and in the actual movie, a group of oversexed young people who venture out to a remote location and start poking around where they shouldn’t. But West possesses a unique ability to utilize the rhythms of a familiar narrative or stylistic blueprint and contemporize them so that they don’t feel like a retread of the films that came before. Here he exploits the audience’s knowledge of sex travelogues and hillbilly horror to first make them laugh and then undermine their expectations.
While Maxine and the other actors not only understand but embrace the undertaking of making a porn movie, their director RJ repeatedly aims to make something more artistic, which can be as much of a trap as a noble goal. RJ thinks he’s better than the movie that he’s making—an attitude that has brought low a lot of folks who delved into genre filmmaking for a fast buck—but he quickly discovers he’s neither as imaginative nor as liberated as he thinks. Sometimes, leaning into expectations is the way to get the best results, and in both porn and horror, money shots are more meaningful when the filmmaker gives audiences what they want, then plays around with an inventive way to do it. This is precisely the approach that West has taken in his films, delivering the shock and terror that viewers are waiting for while tossing in some surprises to throw them off balance. His kills possess gleeful, winking indulgences of style, such as blood splatter painting an illuminating pair of headlights red, that serve both as punchlines and protectors of the atmosphere he’s created in the buildup to those moments.
With her button nose, freckles, and roller disco style, Goth feels perfectly cast as a ’70s porn starlet, and as in Suspiria, the actress continues to lend an effortless complexity to characters that don’t necessarily need it. She and Snow amplify West’s respectful depiction of their, uh, characters’ vocational exposure by exuding not just a fearlessness but almost a mundane comfort with their bodies that too many films that fictionalize porn (or quite frankly elect to include nude scenes) fail to capture. Both actresses embrace an empowered and sex-positive attitude that’s mirrored by the film. And while (spoiler alert) a number of the characters do end up on the business end of some barnyard tools, X isn’t interested in punishing them for their sexuality, Friday The 13th style.
Conversely, West creates counterparts in Howard and Pearl who are more fully realized than most horror “antagonists.” He doesn’t go as far as trying to make us sympathize with them (at least not as much as with the younger characters), but he presents their perspective in a vaguely empathetic way, even if they happen to express it more homicidally. And West actually does aspire to explore some concepts that are deeper and more complicated than survival or having sex on film. In particular, he examines the way that youth in others seems to bring out the feeling and impact of age in ourselves, not to mention how we resist or respond to that when it happens.
From an opening shot framed like a 16mm film gate to the blaring red title card that resembles the MPAA’s ratings system, West bakes an orgy of 1970s cultural ephemera into a scrappy American International Pictures-era visual look that conjures everything from Deep Throat to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and all of the attendant sensations that come with them. If he errs on the side of obviousness by needle-dropping Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear The Reaper,” West otherwise assembles a bulletproof list of immediately-evocative ’70s AM radio classics for its soundtrack, while Goth’s overalls and Snow’s rust-colored romper immediately evoke the likes of Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver or Kristy McNichol in Little Darlings.
But ultimately that aesthetic is an act of subterfuge, just like the conventions of the two stories being told: While you’re languishing in the performances and period detail, West is sneaking up to pull the rug out from beneath you, or to raze some outdated cliché. X is bloody, ballsy fun.
47 Comments
“punishing them for their sexuality”? Are they Catholic?
I think it’s worth noting that in the original Friday the 13th the villain may have that as a motivation, the film itself makes a surviving “final girl” out of a woman having an affair with her boss and who drinks & plays strip-poker with the rest of the camp counselors.
noted.
The famous victim in Psycho had shenanigans and stole.
I love that Brian Cox loves that film because it was a chance to just fuck around and not go full serious Shakespearean.
Also worth noting that in Part II there’s an entire contingent of the teens who go into town to get drunk and carouse and such miss out on the massacre entirely.
I did not know that. I’ve only seen Jason Takes Manhattan & the original (in that order). Seeing JTM deterred me from watching more for a while, although my negative estimation of slasher sequels applies more generally.
It’s a thing where none of them are great, but they stop trying to actively be scary and it’s more like a Godzilla movie where you watch to see the monster do his thing. (Jason Goes To Hell sucks though.)
Another series where I’d say just the original is worth watching. Well, maybe not just the original, Shin Godzilla is also good.
Jason Takes Manhattan is probably the second to worst of those to start with after Jason Goes to Hell.I started with Jason Goes to Hell and never watched another one for years until I met my wife.Four is my favorite and the best of the straight slasher ones, but Six is kinda of like a Scream prototype in its meta-ness. I’d recommend those two.
JTM I enjoy mostly for the production trivia. Like knowing how much more they wanted to film IN Manhattan but couldn’t afford it so they had to do most of the movie on that boat.A couple of friends and I write and perform movie riffs and we did JTM last year, so I’m fond for that reason, too.
The first counselor murdered (after the flashback) in Friday the 13th was a total innocent. No interest in drugs or sex, was friendly to the locals. Just before she realizes she’s in danger, she talks about how she always wanted to work with kids.RIP Annie, you would totally have been the final girl in any other movie.
It’s a well-known horror cliche that horny people die.
I usually get Ti West confused with Tom Six. I don’t know why.
Funny, I read Ti West and envision Joe Swanberg.
I just now realized he’s not Eli Roth
I didn’t read the full review as I’m really looking forward to this and want no spoilers.I’m hoping this movie makes up for the god damn awful 2022 Texas Chainsaw Masscare. This movie takes place in the late 70’s and is in the sticks and could easily look like a Chainsaw (73) sequel.I didn’t realize West did House of the Devil and Inkeepers, too totally different horror movies that were both scary as all hell!
“scary”?????????Innkeepers has some great atmosphere but House of the Devil is a fucking nothingburger snoozefest. I do not for the life of me understand why or how anyone gets anything out of that piece of shit.
I grew up in the 80s and remember the fear everyone in 3rd grade and junior high school was scared to death of devil worshipers at that time.
I don’t want to belabor my hyperbole (I both honestly hate the film and acknowledge that said hate is overblown) but there’s no hint of devil worship until the very end. I know the title is what it is but the actual meat of the movie *barely* supports the title. And if it wasn’t listed as a horror movie you’d barely know it was supposed to be one. The movie is 99% “cute 80s-ish housesitter faffs around” and 1% “low budget freakout”.(Screams in rage and shakes fist at sky impotently)
And House of the Devil has one of the biggest continuity leaps of any horror movie ever, which 100% does not work. One second everything’s fine, the next the protag is in the middle of a devil worship ceremony, it’s laughably bad, and makes Rosemary’s Baby look subtle by comparison.
The ending of the Innkeepers is one of my favorites – it takes a long time to get there, but the five minute scene where the ghosts chase her through the hotel is the closest to an actual nightmare I’ve ever seen a movie get.
The ending “jump scare” that was nothing was awesome. That simple cracked open door and the music playing scared me silly that something was coming out of it.
The basement scene where we never see anything other than the characters’ fear is one of my favorite scary movie moments
Yes, it’s a great example of less is way more.
Agreed. Also, I loved Kelly Mcgillis in the Innkeepers, lookin’ all real and everything. She’s sexier all chubbed up than most of the dried up old husks who were starlets during the ‘80’s. (I know, she plays for the other team, and that’s cool).
Between this, Scream, and Studio 666, is there a horror movie coming out this year that Jenna Ortega isn’t in?
Hey, sounds like something that won’t come to streaming until I have forgotten that I want to see it. The pandemic has cancelled my desire to see anything in the theater and it always drives me nuts when I see a release only marketed as being in theaters. A movie like this really seems like something tailor-made for streaming platforms. Hopefully shudder gets it sooner rather than later.
I’m here a year later to let you it’s on Showtime, if nowhere else.
I’m here a year later to let you it’s on Showtime, if nowhere else.
Hi, it’s on Prime Video now
Thanks, going to watch it tonight!!!
If I were a group of horny 70s pornographers I would simply not film my pornographic movie at a remote, cursed farmhouse
Sounds like they had to pay to use the cursed farmhouse too. Pretty dumb when the old, abandoned amusement park and the old, abandoned summer camp could be used for free.
And the old abandoned rollerskating disco would have paid them!
Ti West is not great at writing character motivation.
He did the Vice reporters goes to an ersatz Jim Jones cult movie too right? Did people not like that one?
He did. It got mixed reviews. I thought it was interesting and well made but ultimately left little impression. I prefer Kevin Smith’s similar Red State. (That said, I have a significant bug up my ass about West so take my response with a grain of salt.)
I hope Kid Cudi’s character doesn’t die…but I’m like 90% sure he will lol smh probably first too
Got some bad news for you Pops.
I finally saw it lol at least his death wasn’t overly mean or gratuitous. He honestly had one of the quicker, humane ones. I thought the ‘gator was going to get him that whole scene.
He was a great character. I liked him.
Why would they drive to a barn in the middle of nowhere to film a porn? Why not just use the living room in their apartment? I mean, this looks stupid as shit.
I don’t get the minor cult around this dude at all. Great taste, but not a great writer or director. House of the Devil is overrated beyond belief. Every movie it rips off is about twenty times better.
seems more like marketing from the distributor than an actual cult
I just watched this last night and I really dug it. A very cool experience of a film. I really loved what the director did both visually and aurally.
Just saw it this weekend, I give it a B+ as well. Man it wasn’t what I thought it was gonna be but fuck if it wasn’t great! Loved the ending, loved it!In a way it’s like the visit, in that it wasn’t what I thought it was but fuck if it wasn’t really good.