The film 'X' is like crossing 'Deep Throat' with 'The Texas Chain Saw Massacre' and accompanying it all with a cinephile meta-commentary. The result is something sexy, brutal, fun, witty, and endlessly cinephilic.

A24 and its bold, innovative, and largely experimental projects are a love affair. The new work of the talented but criminally underrated horror specialist Ti West, 'X', is another gem in the coffers of the independent studio that isn't afraid to greenlight the most ambitious and risky ideas. This time, they approved a slasher too explicit for today's puritanical times, about shooting a porn film in the late 70s.

Beyond Low Genres

A group of enthusiasts — the ideological inspiration Wayne (Martin Henderson), his young girlfriend Maxine (Mia Goth), her older stripper colleague Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow), Bobby-Lynne's boyfriend Jackson (Kid Cudi), aspiring director RJ (Owen Campbell), and his girlfriend Lorraine (Jenna Ortega) — decide to shoot an arthouse porn film titled 'The Farmer's Daughters'. For authenticity, the filmmakers head to a real backwater and rent a summer cottage from a strange elderly couple, Howard and Pearl.

Just as RJ wants to go beyond the ordinary sex film, choosing unusual angles and accents, Ti West in 'X' tries to look more broadly at the horror genre. His work is simultaneously a clever stylization of classics (a number of opening scenes literally repeat the beginning of the original 'The Texas Chain Saw Massacre') and a fresh take on the established slasher structure.

Everyone comes here for the spectacle, for severed limbs and liters of fake blood, for sex, after all. Knowing this perfectly well, West skillfully manipulates the audience's mood, mixing two simple plotlines and preparing them for the most juicy part of the film with frankness (in every sense) in detail. In this, the relatively young filmmaker reminds one of Quentin Tarantino, who also absorbed the DNA of the most American cinema and knows how to subtly use any genre techniques for the sake of greater spectacle.

Elusive Beauty, or Unexpected Depth for a Slasher

Let's be honest: from a slasher, as well as from porn, you don't expect coherent reflections or any interesting thoughts. It's all the more pleasant to observe their presence in the film 'X'. The springboard for the conflict here is the thesis that with age, much if not everything fades: beauty, zest, expression, desires, and the ability to enjoy pleasure. In this context, even the motivation of the antagonists looks logical and convincing, and the predictable development of events is no longer so annoying.

Furthermore, Ti West treats his characters with particular tenderness (as appropriate as it is in a story about mass murder), something modern slashers, especially franchise installments, sorely lack.

Here, the screen is filled with living characters with a simple but understandable background, interesting non-template features: Jackson is a Vietnam veteran, which adds new facets to his machismo, and Maxine knows how to separate work from personal feelings, even when it comes to sex with another man. And this makes the deaths of each of the heroes more shocking and gripping, unlike, say, , where the characters act as NPCs, evoking no emotions.

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Cinephilia in Details

In 'X', Ti West shows himself to be a true cinephile. He juggles visual techniques, switching from film to digital camera, changing the frame width, and playing with light to achieve the effects of old cinema. Here and there, the director leaves references to classics: from spoken Easter eggs to 'Psycho' to a clever inverted reference to 'The Shining' and more hardcore references (for example, to Lewis Teague's film 'Alligator').

Notably, Ti West managed to almost unnoticed shoot a prequel to 'X' about Pearl's youth, naturally played by Mia Goth. And in one interview, he casually mentioned that this story could turn into a full-fledged trilogy. Well, it will be interesting to watch this, and we can congratulate on another successful addition to the library of interesting horrors. Fans of the genre are strictly recommended!

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