Film Review: X
Images courtesy of Chris Moss and A24.
Ti West’s pastiche of both slashers and pornographic films X is an engaging cinematic experience that owes a lot to the culture of the ‘70s. Equal parts The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Boogie Nights, it follows a film crew as they stay at an elderly couple’s farm to shoot a pornographic film, unknown to the couple themselves.
Full of visual references to horror films, it’s very clear Ti West is a lover of cinema. A death scene via alligator evokes Spielberg’s Jaws, a character discovering a car sinking into a lake a la Hitchcock’s Psycho, a character even hacks open a door with an axe in reference to Kubrick’s The Shining. However, where another filmmaker would have employed these references without much thought, Ti West recontextualizes them not in order to draw attention to the film itself, but to mirror the audience and interrogate them as to why we watch these kinds of films. The ‘slashers’ in this film are an elderly couple who can’t enjoy sex anymore because of their poor health and old age, so in their sexual frustration, resort to violence against the attractive youthful pornographic stars. It’s a fascinating character motivation in a puritanical genre where having sex will result in your violent death.
Mia Goth portrays Maxine, an adult film actress determined to become a star. Channeling Kurt Russell, Martin Henderson is brilliant as Wayne, a pornographic film director trying to get himself out of debt. My personal favourite character was French New Wave inspired filmmaker RJ (Owen Campbell), who is determined to make an artistically satisfying dirty movie. His girlfriend Lorraine, played by Jenna Ortega, is an initially conservative soundie who is roped into the film by RJ before finally deciding she wants to film a scene. Finally, we have Brittany Snow as Bobby-Lynne and Kid Cudi as Jackson Hole, who are probably the most stereotypical characters, but the actors bring enough charisma to the roles that we can look past this.
X is a fun homage to ‘70s grindhouse cinema that occasionally dabbles in meta-commentary on why we as a culture enjoy and make films. In fact, there’s even a Get Out-esque red herring where the audience begins to suspect that the main villain wants to take over someone’s body in order to be youthful again, but the film cleverly subverts this expectation. The references to classic horror cinema feels natural so that an audience member unfamiliar with, say, the car sinking in Psycho may not pick up on it, but a familiar audience member will and enjoy the reference. Likewise, X can be meta without being alienating. For one, it is a film fundamentally about filmmaking. At one point, RJ says ‘I know I can make a good dirty movie’. Replace ‘dirty’ with ‘horror’, another genre unfairly dismissed by critics, and you have a very good case as to why RJ is a self-insert of Ti West himself. This makes sense since RJ feels like the most three dimensional character in the film.
X is not revolutionising the slasher, but it is a very self-aware and welcome entry into a genre that is growing stale. Its genre pastiches of both pornographic films and 70s grindhouse films are very well executed and even border on camp at times, but in a tongue-in-cheek and self-aware way.
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X is screening in cinemas nationally from the 24th of March.