X (2022)
A porn shoot promises a future while the hosts cannot stop looking backward.
Directed by Ti West · Written by Ti West · Approximately 106 minutes
Source-based draft for editorial review. The verdict and advisories are proposals; numerical Corny DNA remains unscored. No fresh viewing is claimed.
Before you watch
Strong sex and nudity are integral to the porn-production setting. There is also non-consensual touching and kissing of a sleeping woman, and substantial bloody violence. The film’s use of ageing bodies as frightening imagery is part of the editorial caveat, rather than an assumption that age or desire is itself disturbing. Release and content guidance. Specific outcomes stay behind the spoiler disclosure.
Specific content details (contains spoilers)
- Killings include repeated stabbing, severe eye injury, shootings and a crushed head.
Everybody wants a different movie
A small adult-film crew rents accommodation on a rural Texas property in 1979. Their hosts do not fully understand what has been booked, and the crew is hardly united about what it wants to make. Commercial ambition, artistic pretension, sexual freedom and relationship insecurity are already competing before the situation becomes a slasher film.
Ti West gets useful friction from those differences. The pornography is work, but not work everyone understands in the same way. A director can imagine that artistic seriousness exempts him from jealousy; a performer can see the same production as a practical route to a better life. The horror does not have to invent conflict from nothing.
Mia Goth’s dual casting as Maxine and Pearl gives the film a conspicuous visual proposition about youth, age and unrealised desire. Brittany Snow and Jenna Ortega contribute different attitudes toward the shoot and toward being seen. The ensemble makes the early conversations more than a queue for later deaths, even when the screenplay eventually reduces its range of possibilities.
Looking has consequences
The production within the production lets the film compare chosen display with invasive observation. Being willing to perform for a camera is not blanket consent to somebody else’s attention. That distinction becomes especially important when the film moves from voyeurism into an encounter involving a sleeping woman.
The farmhouse setting and deliberate relationship to earlier rural horror provide a clear genre framework. West can exploit a familiar space, an isolated person and an approaching threat without needing to explain a mythology. The pacing gives those arrangements time to acquire tension.
Its larger argument is less secure. The film grants Pearl loneliness and frustration, yet also relies on an elderly body being received as a shocking intrusion. Acknowledging her desire does not automatically free the imagery from age-based revulsion. The dual casting makes the comparison pointed, but also risks turning two people into an unusually emphatic illustration.
Freedom without a guarantee
The adult-film crew’s confidence can be shallow, and the hosts’ moral authority is no more trustworthy. That leaves room for a film about who gets to pursue pleasure and who thinks they can regulate it. The slasher structure supplies a blunt answer through survival rather than a subtle social settlement.
There is substantial craft and enough interpersonal tension to make the genre exercise worthwhile. The recommendation should still account for the sexual assault, the gore and the unresolved problem of how the film asks us to look at age. Those are part of its method, not incidental material that can be waved away because the film understands horror history.
Corny DNA
The period styling, dual-role design and extravagant violence are consciously arranged. There is black humour and an interest in exploitation forms, but recognition of those forms is not a substitute for assessing their use. Numerical scores remain null.
Verdict
Watch with caveats — proposed. The ensemble and the contrast between performance, labour and voyeurism make this more than a list of slasher references. Its treatment of ageing and its sexual and violent material require clear caveats.
Spoilers from here
Reveal the ending and detailed analysis
Pearl and Howard become the killers, making their envy and control physically destructive. Maxine survives by violence rather than by receiving a moral exemption for the film she wanted to make. Her televangelist father’s presence on television complicates the separation between supposedly pure authority and disapproved desire.
The final discovery of the crew’s footage makes the film-within-the-film another object to be categorised by outsiders. It is a neat concluding joke about genre and judgement, but does not fully resolve the more difficult question of whether Pearl has been understood or simply made into a memorable monster.
Sources
The original owner-supplied Seen-export provenance is retained. It confirms viewing, not approval of this proposed recommendation.