Ti West returns to form with the horror/porn homage X

When Ti West first emerged in the mid-2000s with films like The Roost, The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers, he was the new voice of horror. His films were trashy, post-modern and (sometimes) bloody as hell. They were throwbacks that reimagined iconic genres of the past through an ironic contemporary lens. They were movies about movies and didn’t pretend to depict the real world as much as they expanded cinematic conventions, pushing genre categories to their limits.

After his early success, though, West faltered. He failed to find his footing in the aesthetics of found footage for The Sacrament and his attempt at westerns, In a Valley of Violence, felt bland. X, though, marks a return to what West does best. X is like Texas Chainsaw Massacre meets Deep Throat meets Shyamalan’s The Visit. It’s a late 1970s throwback that pays homage to past films with a modern twist. It’s a tangibly uncomfortable movie, for better and for worse.

Maxine (Mia Goth) wants to be a star. Shining with that 1970s sweat glow and made up with robin’s egg eyeshadow, Goth looks the part of the innocent vixen ready to do anything to achieve her American dream. She snorts cocaine in the bathroom of a rundown Texas burlesque club. Her boyfriend/boss Wayne (Martin Henderson) has cast her as the star of his latest business venture, an adult movie tentatively called The Farmer’s Daughter.

Maxine and the rest of the crew are packed into a van en route to an isolated farm. Brittany Snow stars as Bobby-Lynne, Maxine’s blonde bombshell co-star, who can’t keep her hands off Jackson Hole (Kid Cudi), the dirty picture’s male talent. The crew is rounded off with director RJ (Owen Campbell) and his girlfriend/assistant/sound girl Lorraine, aka Churchmouse (Jenna Ortega). 

When they arrive at the farm, they’re faced with a hunched over and disagreeable older man. He doesn’t seem particularly keen on the bus full of bohemians at his doorstep, but it’s clear he needs the money. He warns them to stay out of the way of his wife — a looming figure in a window. The group agrees and gets to work shooting their XXX movie. 

Ti West has a strong sense of mood as he brings us into the propriety. Aside from a foreboding cold open that hints at something sinister on the horizon, violence takes time to creep into the plot. Instead, discomfort emerges through the film’s editing, which privileges intuitive and motif-oriented montages and dizzying match-cuts. The film’s construction is brazen and bold on a purely formal level. It carefully draws the audience into a destabilizing environment before shit completely hits the fan. 

Total credit to West as a filmmaker that he ultimately takes the horror into unexpected directions. Though the kills aren’t exactly the most original, the source of the horror comes from an unexpectedly “real” place. As the film crew spends more time on the farm, we also get to know the older couple better — mainly their despair and disappointment in having their youth slip away from them. While, overall, I have some mixed feelings on exploiting old age (particularly bodies) for scares and ickiness, their presence has a clear thematic thrust. X captures very deep-rooted anxiety over aging and earnestly treats its older characters’ yearning. They’re not just lurking boogeymen, they’re full-fledged people with wants and needs (though, there’s room to argue whether their characterization works). 

X is equal parts homage and update, revelling in the aesthetic sleaze of old-school horror and porn. The equation of cum shots and horror kills isn’t necessarily new, but it’s rare for filmmakers to push that metaphor to its limit without coming across as explicitly anti-sex. 

Mia Goth remains central to the appeal of X. She has that “X” factor the characters in the film thirst over. Her presence even outsizes her career, and it’s hard to believe she’s barely made 10 feature films. She’s careful in the roles she chooses, working almost exclusively with transgressive auteurs like Lars von Trier, Claire Denis, Gore Verbinski and Luca Guadagnino. Though some credit is due to her bleached eyebrows, which exaggerate an alien quality, she has a mysterious interior world that translates beautifully to the screen. As Maxine comes across as equal parts wholly free and calculated, a woman both liberated and entrapped by her beauty and sex appeal expectations. 

For people hungry for new horror, X certainly delivers. The movie pushes boundaries without necessarily veering too deeply into the territory of bad taste — though I’m a terrible judge of these things. If you’re squeamish, this might push some buttons. It’s by no means a perfect movie, but in the realm of contemporary horror hitting theatres, you could certainly do much worse than this if you prefer a bit of blood in your catharsis. ■

X opens in Montreal theatres on March 17.

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