Must be one god-damned ******-up horror movie.
If you weren’t all in on Ti West as a new horror auteur, you know, the auteur theory being deeply flawed while still also containing a lot of creative truths as long as you don’t take it to far in either direction etc etc etc, well, he’s made his boldest, and to my way of thinking, his most successful, attempt to earn that title in 2022. It starts here with X, which finds us in the rural Texas of 1979, as a filmmaking troupe attempts to create the next big sensation in porn while camped out on the decrepit property of an elderly couple. From there things get pretty crazy, but the first thing you’ll notice about X is just how deeply invested West is in the grainy, gritty look of the seventies film and he captures it to perfection. The film just looks and feels fantastic and, to my mind, it’s too deeply lived in for it to even be called superficial, but if you want to reduce it to that, well, the film still has a lot more going on than just those superficial pleasures.
The performances by the ensemble cast are genuinely all fantastic, top to bottom. Mia Goth deserves to take top notices here for her performance as both the fame-hungry Maxine and, buried under a lot of make-up, the elderly Pearl. Now, there is a lot of make-up, but still, I didn’t realize until the credits that Goth was playing both roles and I have to say that Pearl is a creation that has no connection to the rest of Goth’s performance in this film. All the way down to the way she stands and moves, Pearl feels nothing like Goth at all. It’s quite remarkable. This double casting is more than just a stunt though. West’s film is interested in exploring a lot of themes related to desire, sex, violence, youth, age and, of course, creativity and commerce. The discussion of art versus commerce gets a lot of discussion as do the various hypocrisies of the way we think about things like art and pornography. Howard and Pearl, the elderly couple, are in many ways treated by the film as monstrous; they’re grotesques and we’re meant to be repulsed by them. At the same time, however, the film treats Pearl specifically as a character we feel a great deal of pity for. It would be easy to make the case that this film is about otherizing the elderly and making them into monsters, but the movie is also communicating the emptiness Pearl feels and the tragic sadness of her life. Well, a movie can do two things, right? This one can. In kind of the same way, it wants to feel positively about sexual freedom and even downright romantic about sexual connection, but also a little sleazy about the urge to monetize sexuality. It’s just a complicated movie that wants you to think about these themes more than it wants to tell you what to think about them. There’s a sex scene late in the film that flirts with romanticism, suspense, repulsion, terror and, for all that, it’s also just something I hardly ever remember seeing before in a movie. These are the tricks this movie has up its sleeve.
On the character front, I think it delivers. The characters are all well-written and while some of them are a little broad, they all felt more or less grounded to me. The emotional connection to those characters is a big part of why the movie works. The late movie sex scene I talked about above is a great example of how a scene that might have seemed only tricky or suspenseful becomes so much more because of character work. And there’s a beautiful scene of one of the characters singing Fleetwood Mac’s Landslide that is just as quiet and luminous and beautiful a scene as I’ve encountered in a horror movie in a long time. As that quiet scene slowly unfolded, I just realized that I bought all of the characters as people and, while not all of them were, you know, great people, I was invested in all of them and interested in them.
And, finally, yes, the film delivers as a horror movie too. Ti West is adept at creating tension and dread and as the film slowly builds, the atmosphere becomes more and more oppressive. There’s an incredibly suspenseful scene in a pond early in the film that I really didn’t expect. And when the violence finally does erupt, it’s in one of the film’s most graphic scenes, a shockingly graphic stabbing that seems to just go on and on. From that point, one could quibble with moments here or there; one character has a very disappointing death in my opinion, and the structure falls into a pretty classic slasher structure for about the last thirty minutes or so. But still, it’s shocking and visceral and disturbing in ways that typical slasher aren’t because of the craft on display here.
X is definitely a slow-burn and I know some horror fans haven’t taken to it, but I absolutely loved it. It’s West working at the top of his game and crafting a tense, claustrophobic, disturbing, surprisingly emotional experience. It gives the viewer a lot to think about and a lot of conflicted emotions to feel; it’s a slasher movie, but so much more. It’s a slasher that takes time to care about its characters, even its “monsters” and to build tension and genuine unsettling atmosphere before it unleashes the violence. And then, yes, it does become a film where the gore functions as catharsis, Grand Guignol in the classic sense. It isn’t just gore for the sake of being gross; it’s gore on a transcendent level, at least in parts. X is a remarkable film in just about every way in my opinion. And get this: it actually nails the credits scene with a post-credits stinger that absolutely blew me away. More on that . . . later. For now, X gets the rating it deserves. 4 stars.
tl;dr – dread-soaked slasher evokes the seventies & explores a myriad of fascinating themes while also giving you characters, and even villains, to care about; horror filmmaking on an auteur level. 4 stars.