Ti West’s “X”
X (2022)
A well crafted retro-horror that finds time to skewer fundamentalist Christian values and touch on issues of aging and sexual politics while maintaining its lightness
As a cinephile, there are some nice winks throughout this film particularly toward old cinematic techniques if not specific references to films, most notably Toby Hooper’s “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”. It does a terrific job of capturing the era and avoids falling into cliches and in at least one instance, it turns a trope entirely on its head. That said, it isn’t as relentless as his early flim, “Triggerman”, as intricate as “The House of the Devil” or as subtly spooky as “The Innkeepers” but it’s its own thing and even thinking about his filmography shows how versatile he is within the horror genre.
X has more humour than I recall in any of his films and even though it’s set in 1979, most of the themes that are touched upon are still relevant from hypocritical fundamentalist religion to sexual politics.
The story begins with a group including aspiring porn actors Maxine Minx(Mia Goth), Bobby-Lynne Parker(Brittany Snow) and Jackson Hole (Scott Mescudi) along with producer and boyfriend to Maxine, Martin Henderson(Martin Henderson) and amateur film director R.J. Nicholls(Owen Campbell) and his girlfriend/assistant Lorraine Day(Jenna Ortega). Common to all of them is a desire to escape the confines of their lives and in particular to achieve the financial independence needed for their liberation from poverty.
To achieve this, they’ve booked a cabin on a remote farm to film “The Farmer's Daughters” though they’ve neglected to tell the owners, an elderly farming couple who are off. What follows is a skilled sequence of events that play up and undercut cinematic tropes in suitably disgusting fashion. The cast are all solid though Mia Goth steals the show.
It’s a nostalgic, cinema-literate slasher that’s contemporary and engaging. Also worth noting that it’s part of a trilogy with a prequel and sequel following on from X but this stands well enough on its own.
