106 min | R | March 18, 2022 | A24
A film crew rents a remote Texas farmhouse in 1979 to shoot a porno without the elderly owners catching on. The old woman catches on. She wants what the young people have, and she will take it.
X is a slasher set on a rural Texas farm in 1979. A small crew arrives to shoot an adult film in a guest house, hiding the project from the elderly couple who own the land. The setup runs on appetite. The young cast wants fame, money, and sex, and the old woman watching them wants back the youth and desire she lost. Ti West builds the whole film around the violence of envy and the cruelty of a body that stops cooperating.
Mia Goth plays both Maxine, the ambitious young star, and Pearl, the elderly woman who hosts her. As Maxine she carries a hard hunger that refuses to stay small or grateful. As Pearl she works under heavy prosthetics and finds the grief and rage buried under the wrinkles. Brittany Snow plays Bobby-Lynne with a warmth that makes her the most human person in the house. Kid Cudi plays Jackson with easy confidence, and Jenna Ortega plays Lorraine as a churchgoing girlfriend who talks herself into curiosity. Martin Henderson plays Wayne as a hustling producer who believes his own pitch.
Ti West writes and directs with a control the genre rarely earns. He shoots in tight frames and split screens that let one image comment on another. A swimmer drifts on the surface while an alligator slides beneath her in the same composition. The editing rhymes sex and death until they look like the same act, and the sound design leans on cicadas, creaking wood, and the snap of that gator to keep the farm alive and hostile. The grain and warm light make the whole thing feel pulled straight from a drive-in print.
X understands that horror works best when it is about something. The film treats aging as the real monster and the need to be seen as the thing that gets people killed. West refuses to mock his characters for wanting more than their lives hand them. He grants Maxine and Pearl the same drive and lets the film ask why one gets to chase it and the other does not. The result is a slasher that earns its blood and remembers to mean it.