X begins with a group of bohemian young men, led by would-be impresario Wayne (Martin Henderson), who leaves town to shoot porn. This is a bad idea if you’re in a slasher, but the aspiring adult movie stars – the bumblebee Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow), the well-endowed Vietnam veterinarian Jackson (Scott Mescudi), and Wayne’s famous hungry girlfriend, D’Maxine (Mia Goth) – have no chance of realizing how little chance they have of survival. It was 1979, a year earlier Friday the 13th came out, and over a decade and a half before Matthew Lillard laid down the rules to make it come alive from a horror movie, with number one “Sex equals death.” That said, if any of them had been seen The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which hit theaters in the fall of 1974, they would at least be a little honest about crashing into a pickup truck and going to a far-flung farm in an economically depressed swatch of rural Texas. They pass a gruesome roadkill incident on the street, and then the owner of the property, an apologetic man named Howard (Stephen Ure), greets them with a rifle before reminding them that he has agreed to rent the building . If you will stay after that, all the battles that follow will really be your own damn debt.
Xa well-constructed new film by writer-director Ti West, does not directly address the metafictional commentary of Screaming or The cabin in the woods. But it’s very much about the traditions of horror films – especially the conservative moralization at the core of slasher stereotypes, where fucking and drinking and drug use are inevitably punished with gruesome endings, and the last girls are bastions of purity. By the standards of the genre, all the characters in the film should be judged, including the aspiring author RJ (Owen Campbell), who works the camera, while his girlfriend, Lorraine (Jenna Ortega), who accompanied him uncomfortably, sound handled. And yet, even when the danger lies in the rural area, and violence threatens to break out of somewhere, the film never condemns the libertinism of its main characters. Despite RJ’s insistence that he will include avant-garde techniques – “It’s possible to make a good dirty movie!” he tells Lorraine – the movie they make, The peasant daughters, does not look like it will revolutionize the industry. But participants are all thrilled, sure the mainstream acceptance of porn is just around the corner, perhaps with the advent of the home video market.
“We open people up, and it scares them,” says one of the characters as they relax after a day of shooting. But despite a fire-and-swim-style preacher preaching on television in the background, what burns X is as much jealousy as it is a fear of sexuality. When someone eventually dies, it’s in the hands of Wayne’s wife, Pearl, who is also played by Goth, in age makeup, in which the group spies out of the shadows, enthusiastically looking at their young bodies and amusing love. Pearl, who was a dancer when she was younger, once bit into what she describes to Maxine as “the power of beauty”, and tears herself from finding time sexless and invisible. The blood comes again for a while, but it comes in gout once it happens, as if a seal needs to be broken.
West, who has not made a film since 2016 In a valley of violence, occupies an unusual lower world between mainstream horror and the so-called “increased” variety. He is known for the deliberate pace of his work, for drawing the expectation of suspense with long scenes of characters moving through space who at any moment seem ready to reveal something terrible. Like most of the West movies, X is not particularly ambitious in telling his psychology or story. It is his technique that makes his work feel as if it has a foot in the arthouse, with its elegant compositions and the way the camera moves, as if it dared us to see something that the characters have not seen yet. The most spectacular sequence in the film does not include a knife and murderous couple at all, but a spontaneous thin dip in a pond that randomly contains a few alligators. We see the maxi from high above as she swims in the water and then languidly begins to make her way back to the dock, unaware that she is being chased by a deadly creature, and unaware of the danger she is narrowly avoiding .
Goth, with its off-kilter Kewpie doll appeal, is both unexpected and perfect for the Maxine. Like Bobby-Lynne, Snow plays the more conventional beauty, but Goth is able to project a hard-lidded livdness that makes you understand why everyone around Maxine thinks she has the potential to be a star. “You’re a fucking sex symbol,” she says to herself in the mirror at the beginning of the film, though there’s less Pep talk than her saying something she thinks should be obvious. She is the anti-final girl, comfortable in her sensuality and indifferent to the forces that would make her ashamed. She is good enough to feel her double role as a disappointment to the extent that it lends itself to a very different kind of horror cliché by coloring age as grotesque. Pearl, the subject of a prequel West shot on the sly after wrapping X, is treated as pathetic, puts crusty makeup on a ghoul-like face and tries to seduce her unwilling husband to have sex with her. The idea of older characters coupling becomes a gross-out gag, as if feeling desire is a ridiculous thing and body is no longer considered desirable. For all of Xhis sex positivity, which makes the film really scary, drives people out of.
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