It is 1979 and Wayne (Martin Henderson) is ready to make a name for himself in the film industry.  He packs up his girlfriend Maxine (Mia Goth), his stars Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow) and Jackson (Kid Cudi), his auteur cameraman RJ (Owen Campbell) and his girlfriend / boom-op Lorraine (Jenna Ortega) and takes them to an old, remote Texas farmstead.  After a rough meeting with the owner, Howard (Stephen Ure), the film crew is left to their own devices with the understanding that they will leave Howard, and more specifically Howard’s wife, Pearl, alone. 

Ti West writes and directs X, a film that has all the trappings of an A24 horror while oscillating between a nice homage to the down and dirty pictures of the 1970s and a surprising rumination on aging and beauty.  They say that Hollywood loves movies about Hollywood, but the truer version of that phrase is that filmmakers love films about filmmakers and X is a prime example of it.  West’s work here, despite the brutal depravity teased to come in the opening scene, has so much intention behind it that it feels like a love letter; blood, guts, gore, and all. 

The film opens simply enough finding the young, ambitious cast the fish out of water in a dusty Texas town.  As they talk and bounce around in the back of a van, the allusions to Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) are undeniable, and admittedly a little eyeroll inducing, too, because West has not earned being able to work in these callbacks yet.  As the first act begins to unfold, however, West begins to break away and find his own voice in X and the film takes on a life of its own. 

The middle act is a little cumbersome to start as it changes gears from creating the creepy atmosphere and working on a more philosophical level.  West’s script explores a beautiful, and honestly quite tragic, correlation between aging and beauty.  The immediate juxtaposition of the youthful actors and the lumbering and aged Howard and Pearl is initially presented as a simple generation clash – driven more so by the religious cult leader that played over the TV at the start of the film – but it evolves, like everything else in the film, into something much deeper.  West brings up the debate of viewing sexuality as a sin when it is the most human act and calls on us to find our own answer to the question: can we separate sex and love.  But the main question of the film is where our true beauty lies when our youth fades away.  It is a question that Pearl is grappling with and the fear that because she is no longer desirable, is she no longer human.  Does she have worth or value any longer?  Even though her body has grown old her heart still has love inside. 

As we careen into the third act, West throws us feet first into the bloody horror that had been looming over the story like an ominous dark cloud.  The ragtag film crew is very gruesomely picked off one by one and West does a very creative and engaging job at splitting up the team.  He cuts the climax with many insert shots that keep us on the edge of our seat and utilizes the sound design as the major mode of transition between the various threads.  Unfortunately, the middle of this third act does lag as the kills become less inventive and more straightforward, especially when compared to the first couple of hits.  That being said, West is still totally in control throughout and brings the film home for a pulpy and satisfying finish. 

With a long resume of horror films that lean heavily on the films from the heyday of the genre, it is not surprising that X also pulls from those iconic and frightful moments.  The dual narrative structure works very well, here, and the slowly unfolding mystery never comes to a halt to where we lose interest.  X is a brutal film and not for those with a weak stomach.  The film leans heavy on the shoulders of giants, sometimes bold enough to call itself out, but it is not a simple rehashing of the tropes and themes we have seen a million times before.  West’s film, clocking in at a snappy 105 minutes has many lenses to view its narrative through with lots of details peppered throughout lending to its endless rewatchability.