Mark Reviews Movies: X (2022)

X, A24

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 17, 2022

Staying in the guest house on a remote farm is a terrible idea if one is in a horror movie, but from their perspective, the characters in X aren't in a horror movie, obviously. This group is making a porno movie, after all, so there's no reason for worry. We know differently and better, because writer/director Ti West opens his tale with a flash-forward, which shows the cops investigating a brutal and bloody mess at the farm where those unaware free spirits eventually get to learn exactly in what kind of story they're participating.

If West's self-awareness here feels a bit on-the-nose and too jokey, the setup amounts to barely half of the games the filmmaker is playing with this material. Yes, we know this is a horror story from the start. That sense of dramatic irony provides a lot of suspense, as we wait for the inevitable, and a neat gimmick, since it's as if we're trying to solve the mystery of how the crime scene ended up that way as we're watching the crime unfold.

A day earlier, at some point in 1979, the doomed group heads out from Houston to the farm. Among them are strippers Maxine (Mia Goth) and Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow), as well as the club's owner Wayne (Martin Henderson). His big plan is to make a porn movie with these two dancers and Jackson (Scott Mescdui), and after that, the money will somehow flow their direction.

It's not a great plan, but it doesn't have to be, as long as it gets these characters to the farm, owned by Howard (Stephen Ure) and his wife, who has a familiar face under a lot of old-age makeup. It's only a matter of time before the killing begins, and while we know it, these characters don't.

West plays that idea with some humor, too, since the characters come so close to realizing the peril of their situation, only to just miss the revelation. Take the scene in which Maxine, the wannabe star who thinks being in an independent dirty movie will be her ticket to fame, goes skinny-dipping in a nearby lake. While she floats there in quiet contentment, we soon learn she's also incredibly vulnerable, on account of the alligator that's in the lake with her. Maxine swims, and in an overhead shot, the gator enters the frame, too, in accelerating pursuit.

Nothing comes of it, obviously, since it's too early in the story for a character to be killed (and also because there's no room for a chance, meaningless death in this type of story), but consider how much West has pulled off and established with the scene. There's the irony of a character being so close to danger but not seeing it, which is exactly the scenario for everyone in this tale. It's also suspenseful, because of the way the filmmaker crafts the sequence, and wickedly funny, because of the divide of the audience's awareness from the character's.

On a more foundational level for what's to come, West simply points out that there is an alligator in this lake, and that's going to pay off eventually. We just don't know how, when, or why, and that's the twisted fun of something like this, which West establishes he fully knows with that prologue.

If it isn't clear that the director wants us to be thinking about all of this as it happens, he's also included an independent filmmaker named RJ (Owen Campbell), who thinks he can elevate something as base as a porno and finds his assertion that a movie's story can't change halfway challenged by his love for Psycho. Speaking of that film, RJ also marks the change of direction by taking a shower, upset that his girlfriend Lorraine (Jenna Ortega) wants a role in the porno, too.

Yes, there's a lot going on here, and one has to accept, not only the drastic shift in the plot, but also the assorted in-jokes and on-the-fly tonal adjustments that accompany West's cutthroat sequences of vicious slaughter. Those begin once the farmer's wife's envy of the youths and sexual frustration push her over the edge.

Outside of the self-aware games, the film is a tense and chilling piece of horror, thanks primarily to the patience and skill West displays in assembling these sequences of suspense and grisly death. One scene, set in the barn, relies entirely on seeing what's about to happen—a close-up of a nail sticking out of a board as feet approach and a series of three, perfectly spaced holes in a wall—before it does, and that only works following the shock of the first killing, which depends on what we don't see until it's too late.

Through all of it, though, West never loses the idea of bringing attention to why those sequences work or the dark sense of humor beneath the whole enterprise. The tone does regularly shift here, but the most surprising part of that is how those changes transform into a comprehensible pattern. The story can go from a melancholy split-screen montage, juxtaposing a song in the guest house with the wife's grieving over what age has brought, to the first killing without either seeming out of place. The most notable change features an unexpectedly touching scene between the farmer and his wife, before it veers into a suspenseful sort of gross-out comedy.

X, then, is as much an experiment as it is a horror tale. Whether or not the gamesmanship elevates the material (as RJ might put it) is debatable, but it certainly makes the film more engaging, thoughtful, and demented than it otherwise might have been.

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