X (2022)

Ti West's X arrives with the confidence of a filmmaker who has studied the shadiest corners of 1970s exploitation cinema and decided to build a modest shrine there. A cast and crew descend on a rural Texas farmhouse to shoot a pornographic film, and an elderly couple named Howard and Pearl take exception. What follows is a slasher picture made with craft and no small amount of glee. The premise is period pastiche, not historical argument, and the film has no interest in the economics of the adult industry beyond using it as a staging ground for carnage.

The film's cast is diverse in a manner that has become unremarkable in contemporary horror. Mia Goth, Jenna Ortega, and Scott Mescudi occupy prominent roles, and the screenplay never pauses to remark upon it. That is ensemble casting, not a statement. The film does center women and meditates, with genuine melancholy, on aging, beauty, and the pain of lost youth. Pearl watches Maxine swim and sees herself decades earlier. These are exploitation-horror materials, however, and the film treats elderly bodies and elderly desire as sources of revulsion as often as sympathy. The framing is horror, not advocacy. Jackson's service as a Marine is mentioned and his race is not, which is to say the film has no racial project at all.

West never stops to lecture. There is no moral appended to the bloodletting, no lesson about desire or commerce or the environment. The film is depraved and knows it, and any thematic content sits below the surface where the audience may retrieve it or not. A film about the cruelty of aging that declines to preach about it is a rare and welcome thing. This one scores low on every measure of contemporary social messaging, and it seems entirely content with that. We classify accordingly, with mild admiration.