It’s hard to tell exactly what X is playing at. On the surface, writer-director Ti West (House of the Devil, The Innkeepers) offers a titillating riff on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Set in 1979, X follows another band of free-spirited young people whose van makes an ill-advised stop at a desolate Texas farmhouse—only this time, they’ve rented a cabin on the property from the older couple who lives there in order to shoot a quickie porn film. (The couple doesn’t know about this last part.) What follows is a slightly unfocused twist on the sex-and-death genre; promiscuity is punished, yes, but out of hypocritical jealousy rather than any sort of moral high ground. If this doesn’t entirely work, it’s because of the movie’s depiction of the elderly couple. (Spoilers ahead.) X clearly wants us to sympathize somewhat with the wife, Pearl, whose sexual desires are no longer fulfilled by her husband and who is having that loss shoved in her face by these frolicking interlopers. Yet X also depicts the supposed grotesqueness of her aged body as one of the horrors that is inflicted on the film crew as she and her husband defile and dispatch them in gruesome ways. (Consider in particular the scene in which Pearl undresses and slips into bed with one of the women as she sleeps.) Pearl, in fact, reminded me of the depiction of the trans serial killer Jame Gumb (Ted Levine) in The Silence of the Lambs. That film, too, attempted to elicit some sympathy for the tortured psychological state of its killer, but it also used his supposedly grotesque physicality to disturb the audience. Neither movie can have it both ways. Still, as a piece of craftsmanship, X undeniably excites: the opening shot is a wonderfully calibrated reveal; there is another overhead camera angle on a pond, where the composition makes for nail-biting suspense; and there are editing choices that are, to borrow a phrase from the porn film’s director, “avant-garde.” The cast has a wonderful camaraderie, as well, though I do wonder if the decision to cast Mia Goth in a double role—as one of the actors and as Pearl, under icky prosthetics—is part of what makes the latter character register mostly as a ghoul.
(5/11/2022)
