Movie Review: ‘X’ From Ti West

Review by Lauryn Angel

A good horror movie isn’t just scary; it’s disturbing and disrupts our expectations. And Ti West’s latest film, X, is all of the above.

From the opening scene, the film echoes the classic slasher, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, with a secluded Texas farm at which something terrible has clearly happened. We see numerous sheet-covered bodies, but there are no clues as to who is under the sheets and what exactly has happened.

From there, the film jumps back twenty-four hours to the backstage area of a strip club, where Maxine (Mia Goth) is snorting cocaine and giving herself a pep talk. Her lover, Wayne (Martin Henderson) comes to hurry her along, and it becomes clear that Maxine is about to give a performance.

But not yet. Maxine and Wayne get into a van with the rest of their crew – Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow), Jackson (Kid Cudi), RJ (Owen Campbell) and Lorraine (Jenna Ortega) and head out of Houston. But they’re not on just any road trip: they’re headed to a farm in order to make a porno film. Maxine and Bobby-Lynne are certain the movie will make them stars, while Wayne just wants to make money. RJ, the film student, wants to prove that dirty movies don’t have to be bad movies, and his girlfriend, Lorraine, is just there to help with the production. The cast is rounded out by Howard (Stephen Ure) and Pearl (also Mia Goth), the owners of the farm — a decrepit couple who seem more than a bit unstable.

Once the group reaches the farm, the group gets down to business making their film, but Maxine in particular feels a sense of unease. And this is when the movie starts to get really interesting, as West begins to play with the tropes of both adult films and horror movies, allowing the viewer to fall into a sense of complacency, thinking they know what is going to happen, only to subvert those expectations.

The movie is gory, funny, and often disturbing, but it is never boring. It’s a must-see for horror fans.