SXSW 2022 Film Review: X
Ti West returns with a rollicking, grindhouse bloodbath
Combining familiar, 70s grindhouse terror with modern sensibilities, X is director Ti West’s best film since 2009’s House of the Devil. With bloody slasher mayhem unspooling on a porn set, West’s latest slice of brutality brings the nudity and gore, but underneath its vintage horror pastiche lies a sex-positive, beating heart that examines the cutting power of jealousy and the unforgiving cruelty of time. Mia Goth, Brittany Snow, and Jenna Ortega form a new Scream Queen triumvirate. Minor spoilers ahead…
“Mumblegore” darling Ti West has been juking horror convention for over a decade. His two most well-known films, The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers, reconfigured classic genre templates with modern indie sensibilities, delivering simmering payoffs through lo-fi filmmaking, intimate stakes, and a focus on character beats. But those who bristle against West’s deliberate powder keg configurations - a feature of his storytelling that I love - will likely be delighted by the quicker-paced X, a sanguine pastiche of 70s horror with a sex-positive meditation on the savagery of time and the power of roiling envy. While reveling in the crowd-pleasing bloodletting that is the mutant amalgam of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Debbie Does Dallas, X simultaneously skewers the soured tropes and sex stereotypes of a certain slasher era.
Mia Goth - introduced decked in electric eyeshadow and snorting lines of coke - plays Maxine, an exotic dancer who has just agreed to star in her first adult film. Produced by her fiancée Wayne (a sleazily charming Martin Henderson with a pitch perfect McConaughey drawl), “The Farmer’s Daughter” is set to shoot in the backwoods of anonymous Texas with veteran porn couple Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow) and Jackson Hole (Scott Mescudi). Along with a filmmaker named RJ (Owen Campbell) and his mousy sound technician girlfriend, Lorraine (Jenna Ortega), the plucky crew pile into a van and head to their remote farmstead set for Maxine’s grand porn debut, but is waylaid by a singular, ominous warning from the property’s octogenarian owner, Howard (Stephen Ure): Do not disturb his sickly, reclusive wife Pearl (a delightfully surprising bit of stunt casting). The gang does their best to heed Howard’s sinister edict, but it isn’t before long that their porn shoot begins eliciting unwelcome attention from their hosts, which slowly escalates from curiosity to obsession before exploding into a spree of violent ire.
“The mutant amalgam of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Debbie Does Dallas, X…skewers the soured tropes and sex stereotypes of a certain slasher era.”
X is a matryoshka doll of genre tropes, scrambled with a refreshing modern verve and self-awareness. The film opens with the oh-so-familiar 4:3 facsimile of eight-millimeter celluloid, but its aspect ratio is nothing more than an illusory flourish, immediately widening into a full frame as if to say: “There’s more here than meets the eye.” “The Farmer’s Daughter” - X’s movie-within-a-movie - is an on-the-nose sendup of classic porn, featuring a traveling salesman, a broken-down car, and the titular farmer’s libidinous daughters; and the film itself, on its surface, follows a well-tread horror formula: young, sex-obsessed interlopers biting off more than they can chew in a strange, remote location. West weaponizes our familiarity with these conventions, ripping the rug from under us to interrogate the dichotomies of the young and old, free and repressed. A remarkably sex-positive film, X paints each of its performer characters with differing shades of pride and varying degrees of fearlessness, never being judged for their vocation; good-girl Lorraine finds herself in one of the film’s most interesting threads, gradually tempted into the trade by the performances she is capturing, but it’s treated more as liberation than as the seduction of an innocent. Being a slasher, it’s no spoiler to say that the bodies pile up, but X paradoxically steps around the old “sex equals death” trope by making it explicit: Our hapless victims indeed have sex, and they indeed die for it, but their violent, splatstick ends never feel like the puritanical punishments of yore.
Taking a page out of its most overt influence, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, X fleshes out Howard and Pearl as more than just your run-of-the-mill horror spooks. With a brush of faint empathy, West paints his terrifying antagonists with notes of melancholy and tenderness: their fucked-up, homicidal rage a byproduct of seething jealousies and their violent anger begat by the corrosive sands of time. Pearl, caked under grotesque prosthetics, laments her sexless existence and her lost beauty, but she also dispenses much of the film’s most gruesome kills, which range from coup de grâces with barnyard tools to river reptile feeding frenzies. X, naturally, shines when it gets to its murders. Hanging a lampshade on RJ’s cinephiliac obsession with inserting artistry into the porno they’re shooting, West dispatches his victims with maniacal, pictorial glee - the flick of a light switch smash cuts into a screaming pitchfork through the eyes, spurts of arterial spray coat a pair of high beams, and shotgun blasts release chunks for soupy viscera. X walks the razor’s edge between subversion and exploitation, but it never forgets the base appeal of its origins: It’s one of the best slashers in years, and - as the cop who surveys the scene of carnage in the film’s final moments observes - “one goddamn fucked up horror picture.”
