X

(2022) *****

Okay, so a funny thing happened. 

In my review of Pearl, I referred to it as "a massive expansion of filmmaking scope over its predecessor in the trilogy", meaning this one here. I don't know what I was high on when I said that. I rewatched this (and Pearl, actually; a friend of mine and I caught them both as a Saturday night double-feature at an outdoor screening in Highland Park). Turns out this is outstanding in its own right, and I can easily explain why it took me till now to see that.

What's the shortest thing you would say to describe what this movie is about? I myself would fall back on, "it's a slasher about a porno". So I've managed in one fell swoop to invoke *two* genres (Porn is a genre, right?) that people immediately associate with mediocrity, lack of talent, lack of class. Well, not all horror flicks are Anal Graveyard, just as not all movies that are about porn exist to be smutty. Are you really going to stand there and call Boogie Nights smut? Because if you are, we're having a completely different conversation anyway. 

It's comically unironic that one of the characters in X is a cameraman who thinks an *elevated* porno flick can be made, and another is a porn director who's willing to let him prove it. Six people drive out from Dallas to the Texas countryside to shoot a porno, and not one of them is stupid or lacking in imagination. And director Ti West gives everyone ample screen time to think about things and to react like actual people, and not just like whatever you would assume about a bunch of sex-perverts in a horror film. In fact till the halfway point, other than some occasional bits of foreboding (barely five minutes into the movie, the van drives past a bunch of state emergency vehicles dealing with the roadkill of a cow on the highway, for example), it would be hard to distinguish this from an A24 movie about people considering their life choices while shooting a porno.

I mean, lol, I guess it kind of is anyway, but for completely different reasons. 

In any case, if you're inclined to be judgy about Horror or Porno, go into this with an open mind, because there's more to it than that. And I haven't even started talking about the old couple that owns the farm, but to do that I'd need to get spoilery, and so I'll give anyone who hasn't seen X yet a chance to tap out. More after the break.

The porn crew is shooting their movie on the farm of a husband and wife named Howard and Pearl. They're old. Howard is only a few good shocks away from a heart attack, and Pearl (when she can sneak away from under Howard's protective eye) floats frailly about the property, mostly keeping her distance from these young gorgeous women and handsome men. When she does encounter any of them up close, she can't bring herself to look directly at them. 

A careless viewer would put a rubber stamp on Pearl reading "crazy old lady with a poor sense of boundaries", and would in doing so completely miss things like how long she lingers showing one of the starlets, Maxine, an old picture of her dancing on the farm grass, beatific -- a photo, by the way, of her looking *strikingly* like Maxine herself. Even Howard falls curiously silent for an extra moment when he first lays eyes on Maxine...until Maxine's husband and director snaps him out of his confusion and reverie. 

Knowing nothing of Pearl's backstory at the time, anyone with a heart and a sense of clarity about life and what happens to us when we get old would see that Pearl is just a human, well along in years, stirring to memories of what it was to be young with desires rather than very old with desires. And right in the middle of all of this churned up longing, we have a break in the action which would seem cartoonish in a movie that actually was just smutty: the pervs in the guest house sit around their living room and listen to Jackson Hole (I *know*!), the male porn lead, play the acoustic guitar while Bobby-Lynne Parker, one of the female porn leads, sings a pastoral rendition of Landslide by Fleetwood Mac. And I have to say, speaking in my capacity as a professional musician, the guitar solo that Jackson takes is not one that can be so casually played by someone who hasn't spent time knowing and loving the instrument, and the process of learning it.

And as the lyrics roll through, Ti West takes us split-screen through a thoughtful montage of shots lovingly edited to sync up with the lyrics -- including a shot of Pearl's crabby bones poking under the skin of her back as she puts on her nightgown over the lyrics "time makes you bolder, even children get older, and I'm getting older too."

Let me put it this way: there's a genuinely heartfelt narrative taking place in between some rather tangibly porny stuff, and an ending that gets [makes the head blow up gesture with his hands] BCCCHHHH -- verrry bloody. And it may take you, as it did me, a couple times watching X and Pearl to grasp it, but Ti West has painted an entire world in Blood and Soil with these first two movies in his trilogy, and the depth of the detail and subtext becomes more apparent the longer a look you're willing to give it. 

Now I'm *really* looking forward to rewatching Maxxxine.