X (2022)

  

 

 

Here there be spoilers…

 

Ti West became an indie filmmaker star with his excellent slow-burn, lo-fi Horror film House of the Devil (2009) and its equally effective follow-up The Innkeepers (2012). He lost much of that buzz to other up-and-coming directors aiming for the sliver between art-house and raw genre cinema like S. Craig Zahler and Robert Eggers when he failed to gain as much attention in trying to expand his scope and try different ground. The Sacrament (2014) was an interesting if stylistically overstrained take on the Jonestown story, whilst In A Valley Of Violence (2017) was an excursion into the Western that garnered little attention despite being surprisingly good. X sees West retreating to relatively safe ground in appealing overtly to fellow retro-minded Horror movie lovers, by making a movie that presents itself as a tribute to a certain retro ideal of the genre, and most particularly Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). Indeed, not so much a riff on the whole movie but on that one, famous, iconic shot of hotpants-wearing Teri McMinn advancing on the menacing farm house, with its nudging, sardonic deployment of sex appeal as overture for limitless but curiously asexual degeneracy. West delves into the particular quirks of the 1970s cinema culture, a time when low-budget filmmakers, his ancestors in the craft, had the choice of making grindhouse genre films if they were moderately ambitious or porn if they just wanted to rake in cash.

 

 

So West presents a simple set-up that both comments on that by-gone world of fly-by-night filmmaking and tells a story that might easily have sprung from it. An eager gang of wannabe stars and auteurs go for a jaunt in the country to make a porn film to be entitled The Farmer’s Daughters, and soon find themselves in a deadly situation. The shoot is produced and overseen by strip club owner Wayne (Martin Henderson). His coke-snorting girlfriend Maxine (Mia Goth) and his most popular dancer, Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow), are the female stars, and Vietnam veteran turned actor Jackson (Scott ‘Kid Cudi’ Mescudi) is featured stud. Young film nerd RJ (Owen Campbell) has been hired to actually do the filming, with his initially bemused, but soon fascinated, girlfriend Lorraine (Jenna Ortega), recording sound. The gang rock up to a remote property where Wayne has arranged with the owner over the phone to hire out a bungalow for the filming, although Wayne hasn’t told him of their actual purpose. The wrinkly old coot homesteader Howard (Stephen Ure) reacts with disdain to the young people and asks them to keep away from the big house and not upset his wife. Some of the crew nonetheless keep glimpsing that wizened woman, named Pearl (also Goth, caked in heavy make-up), and when Maxine converses with her the crone seems to make sexual advances on her. During the night, the percolating unease blooms into proper carnage.

 

 

West has dipped his toe into provocateur waters before, as with the jarring but period correct age difference between the middle-aged hero and teenage heroine of In A Valley Of Violence, and here he aims to go all out in cheery fashion with different varieties of ickiness. To his credit, West tries to animate ideas with potential whilst recreating a milieu, portraying different forms of reactionary gall and reforging much of the cultural conversation around the schisms from that time into the stuff of his narrative. Where Hooper was careful in teasing apart the erotic and the horrific, as the Sawyer clan in his film were far too devolved to even know what to do with the women they assaulted other than make lunch meat of them, West makes the politics of desire and difficulties of liberation pivotal to proceedings. Maxine is eventually revealed to be the daughter of a ranting preacher (Simon Prast) constantly glimpsed on TV screens in the rural region the would-be pornographers travel into. But Maxine is following an alternative religion of Me Decade brashness as she hopes the movie will make her into the star she already feels she naturally is. Meanwhile Pearl is revealed, despite her age, to be a highly libidinous woman who’s also a vicious psychopath, desiring youthful bodies of both sexes and brutally laying claim to them. Her husband Howard, who’s grown too infirm himself to sexually satisfy her, guiltily aids her. By having Goth play both the lush young thing and the nasty crone, West makes obvious what is already implicit, that they are different editions of the same thing. Maxine is desperate to avoid becoming Pearl, who longs for her days of being an attention-getting beauty and tries, Countess Bathory-like, to hold onto a final flicker of youth by forcibly stealing it from the young.

 

 

Meanwhile RJ is goaded to personal crisis when, after blathering on about his attempts to inject artistry and meaning into the threadbare porno he’s making, Lorraine suddenly expresses an interest in appearing in the movie. Wayne eagerly assents to this, and talks RJ into to filming his girlfriend doing the nasty with Jackson, after RJ’s rather horrified initial reaction. RJ breaks down sobbing as he showers after the filming. These scenes are easily the best in X, reiterating the strong feel West evinced in his earlier work for situating fairly ordinary if barbed character travails, painted with the kind of humdrum palette familiar from indie cinema, within the context of genre stories and images. There’s something really interesting in this part of the movie, particularly as RJ is wryly portrayed as a total geek who nonetheless reacts like any old-fashioned chauvinist cliché when confronted by his lady’s transgressive urge, whilst good ole boy Wayne is entirely accepting of all the new rules and calmly explains to RJ the dangers of trying to control his girlfriend. Ortega also gets to throw off the neutered vibe she was obliged to project as the saintly incarnation of Beta immigrant spirit in Jon M. Chu’s In The Heights (2021) in playing Lorraine, who seems initially to be the regulation prude (and thus likely Final Girl) in the storyline only to dissect her own reactions and the arguments of the others before eagerly signing on.

 

 

But the rest of the film never finds a truly inspired way of dovetailing its obsessively referential visuals and desire to explore new transgressive dimensions with a blackly comic tone. Who knows how many stories like this have led up to some hot young ladies chained up in some old bastard’s basement. The notion of making the aged woman the killer and rapist is at once a bit obvious as a twist, if also one with some potential, given the frame West builds around it. But the potential power is sapped by West’s choice of casting two young actors made up to look old, particularly in the case of Pearl, where it might have been genuinely weird to see an actual old actress portraying such mania. I hate to credit M. Night Shyamalan with anything, but he did a better job at making the elderly scary on The Visit (2016). Not only that, but Howard and Pearl are rather vaguely characterised and insubstantial as antagonists. Howard’s first appearance seems him acting like a pure hillbilly caricature, waving a shotgun and fiercely telling the gang he doesn’t like them, and Pearl hovers around acting batty, when the film would likely have been far more effective if West had developed a note of strained politesse and distracting hominess, much as Gene Jones helped provide for him on The Sacrament.

 

 

West’s desire to channel the superficial textures of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the specific vibe of sun-kissed seediness and down-home menace, is blatant, including the ironically pastoral setting and gang of lissom youths rolling through grassy landscapes in a van. West also seems to have watched Hooper’s little-remembered follow-up Eaten Alive (1976) with its more theatrical spectacle and the notion of a pet alligator being used to dispose of unwanted corpses. West stages a random but wittily-handled suspense sequence as Maxine goes skinny dipping in a waterhole on the property, oblivious to the alligator slowly cruising towards her: West revels in his nasty sense of showmanship as he repeatedly cuts to a high overhead shot to observe the beast as it slides up behind her with stealthy patience. This patience gives way to sudden shock when the animal, virtually forgotten, suddenly pounces on a victim much later in the film. West tries a similar feat when he zeroes in on a jutting nail awaiting the soft pad of Wayne’s foot, although that’s another trick that’s been done better recently, in A Quiet Place (2018). The trouble is that the harvested ‘70s Horror tropes never feel refreshed, or even that cleverly enlarged upon. This goes also for many elements in the script: Jackson’s recalled ‘Nam angst and Bobby-Lynne displaying her great capacity for faking orgasms are vignettes that feel clipped out of other movies and redeployed without any gloss of new meaning or personal intensity.

 

 

West does however wisely skip around other clichés. Wayne isn’t revealed to be some sort of brutish sleazebag or hypocrite, but is just an upbeat ringmaster preaching erogenous-capitalist gospel. Surviving an ordeal in battling her ancient doppelganger doesn’t send Maxine scurrying back into the arms of the patriarchy, but makes her double down on her tunnel-visioned self-devotion. Snow, always an engaging performer, is particularly good as the slyly intelligent and sardonic Bobby-Lynne, who reveals actual craft as both a performer and a director, as when she gets RJ and Jackson to improvise a shot where Jackson using a petrol pump becomes a visual double entendre. But there was, for me, something badly lacking from X in terms of the intended air of creepy suspense, which suggested West is a few years too late to the party when it comes to the kinds of movies he’s referencing, and a bit too lazy to weave the sustained mood of strained tolerance and discomforting insinuation that’s necessary between the two tribes. The actual violence, when it erupts, is gross and yucky in a Grand Guignol fashion, but West’s attempts to be actually, properly disturbing don’t come off. Even the revelation of some unfortunate young male hippie chained up in the old couple’s basement, seemingly used as a love slave unto death, achieves merely as a theatrical flourish rather than true nightmarishness.

 

 

The quality that distinguished West’s earlier films was his capacity to approach very familiar genre elements in an oblique, realistic, subtle manner, but here he embraces the retro fetishism and the gleeful dip into old-school slasher stuff to a degree that robs the film of any genuine quality of the crazed and the unsettling, and resists any true emotional intensity and catharsis, two qualities West’s model wielded in masterful quantities. A moment like Pearl dancing over a slain victim’s body aims to evoke dizzy, what-the-hell weirdness, but it merely hovers in air quotes. The film’s intended coup of grotesquery comes as Howard finally gets enough mojo back to have sex with Pearl and the two geriatrics screw whilst Maxine hides under the bed and tries to make a silent escape. But, again, for me the intended mixture of queasy humour and suspense didn’t actualise: it’s just too contrived and self-consciously outrageous. West has become a technically accomplished filmmaker, and cinematographer Eliot Rockett’s images are strong, particularly in use of depth of field and perspective. The climactic scenes are well-done in the manner of basic mechanics, with startlingly staged violent twists, and the film’s ultimate punch-line finally gives the game away as a freaky bit of cinematic horseplay: “One goddamned fucked-up horror picture.” Which is a fair enough thing to want to be. But whilst  X isn’t a bad film by any stretch, given the strength of its elements and overall potential, I feel like it should have added up to much more.