Ti West’s new movie X (2022)
Director Ti West returns with another great horror movie starring Mia Goth, Jenna Ortega, and Martin Henderson. The movie is about obsession, dedication and the benefits of youth, but we see many other themes throughout, and it was a pleasure to watch West work many interesting details into a typical genre setup. West also drops in his love for other horror movies, like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Shining and more. He’s not afraid to stop his movie dead and let his favorite song play for a few minutes, but West’s pace does not fall to David Fincher level meandering, instead builds tension and suspense leading to an inevitable payoff.
West knows the payoff is the best part. West teases the audience with hints of something to come, like an Alligator lurking in the pond, and uses those things later in horrific ways. He knows what the audience wants and he plays with that idea. Much like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, West uses a gritty setting to his advantage, and teasing with our expectations using tension and the unexpected, because we know what’s around the corner in a typical horror movie. He rips off the exact first kill scene from Texas Chainsaw, where the character enters a house uninvited but the payoff is different this time around, so that was interesting and unexpected. West has great camera angles and perspectives to poke at the audience and have more fun with what’s coming. In one scene, Henderson is walking barefoot in a barn and we look up at him from the ground, and only the audience can see a nail sticking dangerously up from a board. We know what’s going to happen and this forced perspective is a very interesting way of setting up a bloody payoff. It’s also hilarious. This use of perspective can also be seen elsewhere, and through editing, as he cuts away from the expected to see reactions, or cuts back and forth between characters to invite parallels.
X has a controversial subject matter. Henderson plays Wayne, a porn film producer, who rents out an old house in Texas Chainsaw farm country, and makes his movie under the owner’s nose. The farm owner Howard and his wife Pearl resent these young folks, and Pearl seems the most frustrated, because she can’t be intimate with her husband due to his heart condition. She envies the young film crew and their “sexy fun time” in the porn film. As a result, she becomes a murderer and stabs one of the characters repeatedly in one of the movie’s many brutal slayings. This motive doesn’t really make a lick of sense and I can’t explain it. Pearl seems to have some strange connection to Mia Goth’s character Maxine, and West has a little fun with it because both characters are played by Goth. You could say West is having the most fun of anyone, instead of concentrating on character development or plot.
Overall, this is a new and interesting movie. It’s steeped in nostalgia and retro crap like many, many other movies I’ve seen recently, but West uses these things with more humor and fun than others. As an aside, I think his use of an Alligator is really great but I won’t spoil it. You can actually guess at many of these horror scenes because West knows how to use tension and suspense, and has mastered twisting our expectations, but not TOO much because we still get that payoff we want. This movie is bloody, raunchy (while still R-rated), and gritty, and I think West himself outdoes the contributions of everyone on the film with his style, which I like actually. It’s his best film to date. There are many, many themes throughout and not all of them are just references from past films, which is great. I have to think more about what the movie is trying to say and mull over the ending. It’s that layered. More analysis, anyone?
