X made me breathe a sigh of relief, which is an odd thing to say about a film where a rural Texas porn shoot turns into a night of slasher-style terror.
But it’s a Ti West film, and I waited years to have another Ti West film that would hint at living up to the ecstatic highs of The House of the Devil, his masterful homage to slow burn ’70s horror. X isn’t House of the Devil, but–she says with a wistful sigh–basically nothing is.
It’s good, though, even if some of the horror elements feel oddly obligatory and the film is arguably at its best before the bodies start to fall. X follows fledgling porn star Maxine Minx (Mia Goth) to a farmhouse in the middle of hot, desolate countryside. They need a set to film the dirty movie they’re convinced will set them on the road to stardom, so Maxine’s producer-boyfriend Wayne (Martin Henderson) has rented a place from elderly Howard (Stephen Ure) and his wife, Pearl (also Goth). What Pearl and Howard don’t know won’t hurt them, everyone reasons.
They only make it through one day of filming, and West–who doubled as the screenwriter–ensures that day never feels like an unnecessary prelude as we wait around for something to happen. The atmosphere on set is charged with crisscrossing ley lines of desire, ambition, and judgment, and the personal and the professional are never as clearly divided as the characters would like to believe. They’re hot for each other, for themselves, and for their futures. They lounge about and theorize. They’re funny and thoughtful and naturalistic. We like them, or at least we like most of them, and the characterization here is much more in-depth and sympathetic than many of the films West’s imitating ever truly reached for; it’s interesting and pleasurable to spend time with them, and that lends an aura of solemnity to the eventual genre shift. It feels unfair to have this Boogie Nights-meets-Linklater atmosphere broken apart by incredible violence, and the cruelty of that drives home that murder is, among other things, the swift and brutal interruption of someone else’s story.
Of course, you know that turn is coming. The tensest, most striking, and most iconic shot of the film comes just after Maxine strips down for a swim in the pond and leisurely floats there, submitting to the heat of the day and the cool embrace of the water. And when it’s time to get out, she swims for the dock–never noticing the enormous alligator following in her wake. She never hurries, she never even knows she has a reason too, but we’re holding our breath. The whole first act of the movie is like that.
The defusing of the tension isn’t quite as well-handled. X feels a bit muddled when it comes to its thesis, which makes the alligator scene a microcosm of the film’s weaknesses as well as its strengths … because during that scene, Pearl is looking on, her yearning–half-jealousy and half-desire–both palpable and dangerous. She invites Maxine inside and comes on to her, unnerving her and sending her running.
We don’t need two separate threats. And if we’re going to have two threats, the more significant one maybe shouldn’t be the one the protagonist knows is lurking in the shadows. As excellent as the alligator shot is, it’s an artistic flourish the film doesn’t actually need. Just because I wouldn’t take it out doesn’t mean it should ever have been there in the first place.
After night falls, Pearl and Howard turn on their guests, and we learn that this is something they’ve done before: that Howard, with his weak heart, now seeks to satisfy his wife’s needs by giving her a string of handsome young men and pretty young women who will never get the chance to grow old. You can argue that the grotesque way Pearl is presented–the overdone old-age makeup on Goth, the way the her aged sexuality is alternately nightmarish and tragic, the fact that the sex-hungry murderer is the only bi character–but my problems with this stage of the film are less principled. I’m not truly offended by it, I just think it’s less interesting: that the deaths feel perfunctory and paint-by-numbers and that the thematic material on desire and jealousy feels overworked and far too conscious of itself.
Essentially, I don’t think West’s heart is in the slasher structure, just in its “curiously fatal hangout movie” setup. He’s great at vibes but less strong on incident, and even the film’s strongest moments as a genre homage aren’t rooted in the horror per se: I loved spotting the shot compositions that drew on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, for example, and noting the slasher genre hat-tips of Bobby-Lynne’s song and Maxine’s skinny-dipping, but those horror geek thrills don’t come when anything is happening. (And that is honestly probably good, whether it’s intentional or not. No one wants their terror interrupted by the director underlining that this is like the thing from that other thing.) It’s art, but it’s not going to keep you awake at night.
But it may make you afraid to ever swim in a pond again, and that might be all a horror movie really needs. To riff off Howard Hawks’s “three good scenes and no bad ones” rule, maybe all you need for a good horror movie is one good, memorable scare and no eyeroll-inducing ones. X certainly satisfies those criteria.
And aside from that, it’s just good–beautifully shot, well-characterized (at least with regard to its younger characters), and thoughtful. It’s a terrific showcase for Mia Goth even if you ignore the double-role completely: she’s lightning in a bottle as Maxine, burning with selfishness and ambition and fear and utterly nailing the banger of an ending.* It’s no wonder that West went on to make her the centerpiece of a whole trifecta of Maxine-and-Pearl movies. She has, as the movie itself will tell you, the X-factor. And while the rest of X can’t entirely equal her magnetism, it provides a handsome and compelling-enough frame for it, and that’s good enough for me.
* Just ignore the part where the cops show up. No one needs a final meta touch after that last Maxine scene.
X is streaming on Amazon Prime.