Ti West’s slasher about a pornographic shoot on a Texas farm is patient, funny and made with real skill for an hour, with Mia Goth doing two jobs at once. The second half is a slasher we have seen before, executed better than most.
Ti West likes to make you wait. The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers spent most of their length on corridors and small talk before anything went wrong, and X works the same way. A van full of people who make dirty films for a living drives out to a farm in Texas in 1979, rents a guesthouse from an elderly couple and starts shooting. For an hour it is a film about work: lighting a barn, finding the angle, arguing about whether what they are making could be art. Then it becomes a slasher, and the first hour is the better film.
West is fond of these people, and it shows. Wayne (Martin Henderson) is a producer who talks in slogans and believes them. Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow) and Jackson (Kid Cudi) are performers who enjoy the job and say so, and the film does not sneer at them for it; Snow plays a woman completely at ease with herself and gets the best laughs. RJ (Owen Campbell) is the film-school director who wants to try avant-garde techniques on a picture called The Farmer’s Daughters, and his girlfriend Lorraine (Jenna Ortega), running the sound, is quieter than everyone else and watching harder. There is an evening in the guesthouse where Bobby-Lynne sings “Landslide” while Jackson plays guitar, and we found ourselves wishing the film would stay there. It is a rare horror film in which we did not want the killing to start.
Mia Goth is credited twice, as Maxine and as Pearl, the farmer’s wife, and that casting is the whole idea: the girl and the old woman are the same person at opposite ends of a life. Maxine wants to be a star and says so into a mirror. Pearl stands on the porch in a housedress and looks at her the way you look at a photograph of yourself. Goth plays the young woman with a fixed, hungry stare and the old one with a small, wet-eyed longing that unsettled us more than anything the film does with a blade. The scene where Pearl brings Maxine a glass of lemonade and shows her pictures from her own dancing days is the best in the film, and there is not a drop of blood in it.
Eliot Rockett shoots the farm in the flat, hot light of late afternoon, with slow zooms and long wide shots that leave the house small against the fields. There is an overhead shot of Maxine swimming across the pond while something long and dark closes on her from behind, and we held our breath for the whole of it. Tom Hammock’s production design gives the farmhouse the brown furniture, lace and framed photographs of a house nobody has touched in forty years. Malgosia Turzanska puts the visitors in denim and halter tops and the old couple in clothes from another decade. The score, by Chelsea Wolfe and Tyler Bates, is a low drone, and West, editing with David Kashevaroff, cuts to the preacher on the farmhouse television so often that the sermon becomes the film’s second soundtrack.
The caveat is the second half. Once the killing begins, West does what slasher films do, in the order they do it: one at a time, in the dark, with whatever is lying around, and a splash of something across the lens. The effects are wet and practical and the camera does not look away. But a film that spent an hour making us like these people spends its second hour getting rid of them, and the idea behind Pearl, that old age envies the young and the envy is a kind of grief, gets said aloud rather than shown. One speech does the work a look had already done. We flinched in the right places, and then we noticed we were no longer frightened, only waiting.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is the model, and West does not hide it: a van, a farmhouse, a hot Texas summer, a family that does not want visitors. Tobe Hooper’s film felt like something that had happened. West’s feels like a careful reconstruction by a man who has watched Hooper’s film more times than is healthy, and the care is exactly what the original never had. That makes X easier to watch and harder to be scared by.
See it for the first hour and for Goth, who is doing something here that most actors would not be trusted to try. It is an 18 and earns the certificate twice over, once for the skin and once for what is done to it.
